Follow-up monitoring in a cat with leishmaniosis and coinfections with Hepatozoon felis and ‘Candidatus Mycoplasma haemominutum’

Attipa, Charalampos; Neofytou, Kyriaki; Yiapanis, Christos; Martínez-Orellana, Pamela; Baneth, Gad; Nachum-Biala, Yaarit; Brooks-Brownlie, Harriet; Solano-Gallego, Laia; Tasker, Séverine

The cat was also enrolled into an epidemiology study, 3 thus surplus EDTA-blood and plasma available were submitted for testing for the presence of infectious, including vector-borne, organisms. The cat was PCR positive for Hepatozoon species using conventional PCR, as well as positive for Leishmania species and CMhm using quantitative PCR (qPCR). Subsequent sequencing identified H felis and L infantum. 3 Owing to the small size of the amplicon generated by the initial Leishmania species PCR 4 an additional PCR was performed, targeting the rRNA ITS1 locus of L infantum, 5 followed by sequencing. The forward and reverse sequences of the L infantum were assembled and constructed into a consensus sequence, which was deposited in the GenBank database (MF140257). The DNA sequence was 100% identical to a partial 18S rRNA ITS1 sequence of L infantum (GenBank KX664454) over 258 bp, as found by BLAST analysis (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST). Phylogeny (Figure 3 ) showed the L infantum from this Cypriot cat to cluster with species derived from dogs in Italy and Uzbekistan, a sandfly in Iran and a human in France. The cat was PCR negative for Mycoplasma haemofelis, 'Candidatus Mycoplasma turicensis' (CMt), Bartonella henselae and Ehrlichia/Anaplasma species, and seronegative for feline leukaemia virus antigen and feline immunodeficiency virus antibodies.