Phenotypic characterization of mastitic Prototheca spp. isolates.

Bovine mastitis associated with Prototheca is considered a rare pathology, but is increasing in prevalence all over the world and therefore becoming more relevant to the dairy industry. The biochemical characterization of 47 Prototheca isolates retrieved from mastitic milk was performed in this study using API 20C Aux and two BBL Crystal Kits, followed by an analysis with InforBio software. The usage of this methodology, allowed the identification of discriminative phenotypic characteristics for the strains tested. The differential-character-finding algorithm used by this software permitted the identification of new phenotypic characteristics to discriminate between Prototheca zopfii, P. blaschkeae and P. wickerhamii, such as, citrate, phosphorycholine and arabinoside. The main objective of this study was to determine new phenotypic characteristics that allowed a better characterization of Prototheca spp. Usage of recent bioinformatic tools improved the analyses of several features that are important for a better characterization of Prototheca spp.