Affiliation:
1. Quality Assurance Laboratory (QAL), Comparative Medicine Branch (CMB), National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), Durham, North Carolina
Abstract
Clostridium perfringens is an anaerobic, gram-positive, spore-forming bacterium that ubiquitously inhabits a wide variety of natural environments including the gastrointestinal tract of humans and animals. C. perfringens is an opportunistic enteropathogen capable of producing
at least 20 different toxins in various combinations. Strains of C. perfringens are currently categorized into 7 toxinotypes (A, B, C, D, E, F, and G) based on the presence or absence of 6 typing-toxins (α, β, epsilon, iota, enterotoxin, and netB). Each toxinotype is associated
with specific histotoxic and enteric diseases. Spontaneous enteritis due to C. perfringens has been reported in laboratory animals; however, the source of the bacteria was unknown. The Quality Assurance Laboratory (QAL) at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)
routinely screens incoming animal feeds for aerobic, enteric pathogens, such as Salmonella spp. and E. coli. Recently, QAL incorporated anaerobic screening of incoming animal feeds. To date, the lab has isolated numerous Clostridium species, including C. perfringens,
from 23 lots of natural ingredient laboratory animal diets. Published reports of C. perfringens isolation from laboratory animal feeds could not be found in the literature. Therefore, we performed a toxin profile screen of our isolated strains of C. perfringens using PCR to determine
which toxinotypes were present in the laboratory animal diets. Our results showed that most C. perfringens strains we isolated from the laboratory animal feed were toxinotype A with most strains also possessing the theta toxin. Two of the C. perfringens strains also possessed
the β toxin. Our results demonstrated the presence of C. perfringens in nonsterile, natural ingredient feeds for laboratory animals which could serve as a source of this opportunistic pathogen.
Publisher
American Association for Laboratory Animal Science
Subject
General Veterinary,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
Cited by
4 articles.
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