First Molecular Evidence of and in Dogs from Kyrgyzstan.

Tick-borne parasitic diseases cause mild to severe infections among vertebrate hosts, including dogs. Species in the genus are important tick-borne pathogens and have worldwide distributions. Although there are data on the prevalence and distribution of species among dogs around the world, there is no information available in Kyrgyzstan, according to a literature review. In this study, 337 dogs were screened by nested PCR for the presence of the () gene of piroplasm species. Overall prevalence was 6.23% (21/337) for / spp. DNA sequencing of positively tested samples revealed that eighteen samples were infected with () (5.34%), two samples with (0.59%), and one sample with () (0.29%). The phylogenetic analyses and nucleotide sequences in contrast with those present in GenBank revealed that two nucleotide substitutions (594th and 627th) were found between isolates, including ours, indicating that the mutation is relatively rare. The sequences of other pathogens obtained in this study confirmed 100% nucleotide identity with and sequences in GenBank. To the best of our knowledge, , , and were detected for the first time in dogs from Kyrgyzstan, and it is thought that results will contribute to the understanding of the epidemiology of canine tick-borne pathogens in the country.