Laboratory of Wildlife Biology and Medicine, Department of Environmental Veterinary Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, 060-0818, Japan.
Laboratory of Parasitology, Department of Disease Control, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, 060-0818, Japan.
Microb Genom. 2023 Feb;9(2). doi: 10.1099/mgen.0.000954.
Tick-borne diseases have recently been considered a potential emerging public health threat in Malaysia; however, fundamental studies into tick-borne pathogens and microbiome appear limited. In this study, six tick species (, , and ) collected from two primary forests and an oil palm plantation in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, were used for microbiome analysis targeting bacterial 16S rDNA using next-generation sequencing (NGS). In addition, bacterial species were further characterized in conventional PCRs to identify potential pathogens. Sequences generated from NGS were first filtered with the Decontam package in R before subsequent microbial diversity analyses. Alpha and beta analyses revealed that the genus had the highest microbial diversity, and significantly differed in microbial composition from other tick species. Alpha and beta diversities were also significantly different between developmental stages of . Furthermore, we observed that some bacterial groups were significantly more abundant in certain tick species and developmental stages of . We tested the relative abundances using pairwise linear discriminant analysis effect size (LEfSe), which also revealed significant microbial composition differences between -positive and -negative ticks. Finally, pathogenic and potentially pathogenic bacteria circulating in different tick species, such as , sp., sp. and spp. were characterized by PCR and sequencing. Moreover, and -like potential symbionts were identified from and , respectively. More studies are required to unravel the factors associated with the variations observed in this study.
近年来，蜱传疾病已被认为是马来西亚潜在的新兴公共卫生威胁；然而，蜱传病原体和微生物组的基础研究似乎有限。在这项研究中，从马来西亚婆罗洲沙捞越的两个原始森林和油棕种植园采集了六种蜱虫（、、、、和），用于使用下一代测序（NGS）针对细菌 16S rDNA 进行微生物组分析。此外，通过常规 PCR 进一步对细菌物种进行特征分析，以鉴定潜在的病原体。从 NGS 生成的序列首先在 R 中的 Decontam 包中进行过滤，然后再进行后续的微生物多样性分析。α和β分析表明，属的微生物多样性最高，与其他蜱虫种类的微生物组成有显著差异。和的发育阶段之间的α和β多样性也有显著差异。此外，我们观察到某些细菌群在某些蜱虫和发育阶段中更为丰富。我们使用成对线性判别分析效应大小（LEfSe）测试相对丰度，这也揭示了阳性和阴性蜱虫之间的显著微生物组成差异。最后，通过 PCR 和测序鉴定了不同蜱虫中循环的致病性和潜在致病性细菌，如、sp.、sp.和 spp.。此外，还分别从和中鉴定出了和样潜在共生菌。需要进行更多的研究来阐明与本研究中观察到的变化相关的因素。
