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Providencia heimbachae Associated with Post-weaning Diarrhea in Piglets: Identification, Phenotype, and Pathogenesis

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Abstract

Despites Providencia heimbachae has been isolated from human, penguin, and bovine fetus, relatively little information is available regarding the pathogenicity and biologic characteristics of P. heimbachae. Here, we report that investigation of post-weaning diarrhea yielded bacterial isolates identified as P. heimbachae based on the biochemical tests and 16S ribosomal DNA sequence analysis. The two isolates were positive for utilization of Malonate, no gas production from glucose, and non-fermentation of D-mannitol, D-Galactose, and L-Rhamnose that were different from those of the type strain, and both of them have the ability of adhesion and invasion to IPEC-J2 cells, and were resistant to 21 out of the 41 antibiotics tested. In addition, the isolate 99101 was highly pathogenic to mice and piglets. Histopathology studies on nerve tissue of piglets that developed hindlimb paralysis showed microglia cell infiltration and neuron damage in the spinal cord. Notably, the strains could grow under low temperature (4 °C), which raise attention of a new risk factor for food safety. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of P. heimbachae strain caused post-weaning diarrhea in piglets in both natural and experimental conditions. These findings extended the knowledge of P. heimbachae as an important zoonotic agent, which should be given more attention during surveillance and diagnostics.

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Data Availability

The data were deposited in NCBI GenBank (accession numbers for NCBI: GenBank: CP 028384.1 for complete genome of Strain 99101; GenBank: MT 974580 for 16S rRNA sequencing of Strain WY2).

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Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Dexing Ma at Northeast Agricultural University and Dr. Sen Hu at Harbin Veterinary Research Institute for critically reading the manuscript. We thank Dr. Ping Zhang for technical support.

Funding

This work was financially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 31672532), the Natural Science Foundation of Heilongjiang Province (LC2015006) and the SIPT program of Northeast Agricultural University (202010224006). This work was partially supported by the Project (SKLVEB2018KFKT012) from the State Key Laboratory of Etiological Biology, Lanzhou Veterinary Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

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  1. Zhuo Zhang and Lili Zhao have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Veterinary Medicine, Northeast Agricultural University, Harbin, 150030, China

    Zhuo Zhang, Manman Song, Jilong Luo, Hanghang Liu, Kun Xue, Chengshi Huang & Junwei Ge

  2. State Key Laboratory of Veterinary Biotechnology, Heilongjiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Laboratory Animal and Comparative Medicine, Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Harbin, 150069, China

    Lili Zhao & Hongyan Chen

  3. Northeastern Science Inspection Station, China Ministry of Agriculture Key Laboratory of Animal Pathogen Biology, Harbin, 150030, China

    Junwei Ge

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Contributions

JG, and HC conceived and designed the work. JG, LZ, and HC coordinated technical support and funding. ZZ wrote the manuscript. ZZ, LZ, MS, HL, KX and CH performed the experiments and collected the samples. ZZ acquired, analyzed, and interpreted the data. JG reviewed the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Junwei Ge.

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Ethical Approval

The experimental protocol was accepted by the international recommendations for animal welfare and the Ethical Committee for animal sciences of Heilongjiang province. The animal Ethics Committee approval number is SYXK(Hei)2017-009.

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Zhang, Z., Zhao, L., Song, M. et al. Providencia heimbachae Associated with Post-weaning Diarrhea in Piglets: Identification, Phenotype, and Pathogenesis. Curr Microbiol 79, 1 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00284-021-02697-1

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