Abstract
Leptospirosis is an important zoonosis that in cattle is characterized as a reproductive disease. It is well reported that the main agent of bovine leptospirosis worldwide is Sejroe serogroup serovar Hardjo. Reproductive disease in cattle has several gaps in its knowledge and studies with Golden Syrian hamsters, experimentally infected, are limited. Therefore, a protocol that could reproduce the chronic genital disease in hamsters would be extremely valuable for the advance of the knowledge of that syndrome. The aim of this study was to establish an experimental protocol for chronic non-lethal genital infection of female hamsters by L. santarosai serovar Guaricura (Sejroe serogroup), strain 2013_VF52. For this, two concentrations (1.0 × 108 leptospires/mL and 1.0 × 104 leptospires/mL) were used intraperitoneally in female hamsters of 06–08 weeks of age. Hamsters that survived for up to forty days after inoculation were euthanized. Uterine and renal tissues were collected to evaluate leptospires’ presence by PCR and culture. The protocol demonstrated that 1.0 × 104 leptospires/mL of the strain determined chronic genital leptospirosis in the hamster model. The standardization of a protocol for chronic genital leptospirosis in hamsters can be extremely useful for the understanding of the physiopathology of the infection, as the distribution of leptospires in the uterus and the agent-host interactions.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are thankful to Dra J. B. Souza of Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ) for providing the hamsters. This work was supported by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) Universal project (grant number 423415/2021-2) and by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES) - Finance Code 001. We thank the Postgraduate Program in Microbiology (Federal University of Bahia – UFBA) and Mitermayer Galvão dos Reis for their support.
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WL is a FAPERJ and CNPq fellow, MINDA is a FAPERJ fellow.
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Cristina Barbosa: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing; Anderson dos Santos Oliveira: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Data curation, writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing; Julia Santos Mendes: Investigation, Methodology; Paula Ristow: Conceptualization, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Data curation, Writing–reviewing and Editing; Walter Lilenbaum: Conceptualization, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Resources, Data curation, Writing– Reviewing and Editing. All authors reviewed the manuscript.
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Ethical Committee approved this research for Animal Use at Federal Fluminense University (protocol 4778010519).
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Barbosa, C., Oliveira, A.d., Mendes, J.S. et al. Standardization of chronic uterine infection of hamsters by Leptospira santarosai serovar Guaricura, from serogroup Sejroe. Vet Res Commun 47, 2215–2219 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11259-023-10108-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11259-023-10108-y