Species in Small Mammals in Turkey:sp. nov. Isolated from a Ural Field Mouse ().

Abstract

The genusis composed of Gram-negative, fastidious, facultative intracellular bacteria that can cause bacteremia in mammals and various disorders in humans. Rodents have been reported as reservoirs of more than 30species, seven of which cause zoonotic infections.In the present study, the isolation ofsp. was attempted from 150 spleen samples from 13 rodent species (mostlyspecies) from three geographically different regions in Turkey.sp. was successfully isolated from 65 of these 150 samples (43%). The prevalences ofsp. in tested rodents in the regions of Giresun, Yozgat, and Burdur were 68%, 44%, and 16%, respectively. Using polymerase chain reaction/sequence analysis of the citrate synthase-coding gene (), Bartonellaisolates were classified seven species including,,,, and three putatively newspecies. We performed further identification techniques for one of the threespecies that were different from the validatedspecies according to thesequence analysis.Here, we report the genomic and phenotypic characterization ofsp. strain G70 that was isolated from the splenic tissue of an(Pallas 1881), the Ural field mouse, captured in the Giresun region of northeastern Turkey.sp. strainG70 (RSKK 22001) was characterized by whole genome and partial gene (, 16S ribosomal RNA) sequencing and comparison, scanning electron microscopy, biochemical tests, and matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry. This novelis a Gram-negative, rod-shaped bacterium and has neither flagella nor pili. The genome from strain G70 was 1,606,969-bp-long with a G + C content of 35.7%.was found to be the closest phylogenetic relative of strain G70 (OrthoANI = 90.5%, digital DNA-DNA hybridization = 41.4%). We therefore propose that this new species be namedsp. nov. with strain G70as the type strain.