Oral communication in 10th International Colloquium on Paratuberculosis

August 9^th, 2009

Castellanos E., Romero B., Rodriguez-Campos S., Bezos J., de Juan L., Mateos A., Dominguez L. and Aranaz A.

In this report, we genotyped a collection of Spanish Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis isolates with a combination of six mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units (MIRU) and variable number tandem repeats (VNTR) loci; MIRU-2, MIRU-3 (Bull et al., 2003), VNTR-25, VNTR-32, VNTR-292 (Thibault et al., 2007)
and VNTR-259 (this study). This research forms part of the EU project ParaTBtools.
For this purpose we screened 70 M. a. paratuberculosis Type II and III isolates, obtained from domestic livestock (goats and cattle) and two isolates recovered from wild animal species (fallow deer- Dama dama- and mouflon- Ovis orientalis musimon) throughout 22 different Spanish localities in a nine-year period.
The selected combination of MIRU-VNTR loci differentiated 17 different allelic variants within this population of M. a. paratuberculosis isolates, with a resulting discriminatory index (D) of 0.82. An interesting feature was the M. a. paratuberculosis Type-specific differences observed at the number of repeats at MIRU-3, located between genes SenX3 and RegX3, components of a regulatory system with a role in the virulence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Magdalena et al., 1998). In addition, M. a. paratuberculosis Type-specific number of tandem repeats was also obtained for the novel locus VNTR-259, which as in the case of MIRU-3, was located between a two component regulatory system, AfsQ1/AfsQ2, which has a role in the regulation of the antibiotic production strategies in Streptomyces (Shu et al., 2009)

	Servicio de Micobacterias (MYC). Centro de Vigilancia Sanitaria Veterinaria (VISAVET). Universidad Complutense (UCM).
	Departamento de Sanidad Animal. Facultad de Veterinaria. Universidad Complutense (UCM).