PLoS ONE (Jan 2019)

Occurrence and multilocus genotyping of Giardia duodenalis from post-weaned dairy calves in Sichuan province, China.

  • Jiaming Dan,
  • Xueping Zhang,
  • Zhihua Ren,
  • Liqin Wang,
  • Suizhong Cao,
  • Liuhong Shen,
  • Junliang Deng,
  • Zhicai Zuo,
  • Shumin Yu,
  • Ya Wang,
  • Xiaoping Ma,
  • Haifeng Liu,
  • Ziyao Zhou,
  • Yanchun Hu,
  • Hualin Fu,
  • Changliang He,
  • Yi Geng,
  • Xiaobin Gu,
  • Guangneng Peng,
  • Zhijun Zhong

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224627
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 11
p. e0224627

Abstract

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Giardia duodenalis is a zoonotic parasitic protist and poses a threat to human and animal health. This study investigated the occurrence of G. duodenalis infection in post-weaned calves from Sichuan province, China. Faecal samples were collected from a total of 306 post-weaned calves (3-12 months old) from 10 farms, including 4 intensive feeding farms and 6 free-ranging farms. The overall infection rate of G. duodenalis was 41.2% (126/306) based on the PCR results at any of the three genetic loci: beta-giardin (bg), triose-phosphate isomerase (tpi) and glutamate dehydrogenase (gdh) genes. Giardia duodenalis assemblages E (n = 115, 91.3%), A (n = 3, 2.4%), and A mixed with E (n = 8, 6.3%) were identified among the 126 positive specimens. Multilocus sequence typing of G. duodenalis revealed 34 assemblage E multilocus genotypes (MLGs), 1 assemblage A MLG and 7 mixed assemblage (A and E) MLGs. The eBURST data showed a high degree of genetic diversity within assemblage E MLGs. The phylogenetic tree revealed that MLG E3 was the primary MLG subtype in Sichuan province and also the most widely distributed in China.