COMPARATIVE GENOMICS ANALYSIS OF MYCOPLASMA BOVIS STRAINS ISOLATED FROM LOCAL AND IMPORTED CATTLE

Mycoplasma bovis is an important pathogen of cattle. Clinical manifestation of M. bovis infection can vary from pneumonia to arthritis, mastitis and more. The latter has a serious economic impact, becoming a financial burden on farmers and the entire cattle and dairy industry. There have been several attempts to characterize M. bovis isolates in terms of their genetic relatedness and diversity. Common methods used so far include pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and Multilocus Sequence Typing (MLST). These days, with whole genome sequencing (WGS) becoming ever more accessible, it can be used as a powerful method for genetic characterization with high resolution. Previously, the major manifestation of M. bovis infection in Israel was pneumonia and respiratory tract infections, mainly infecting young calves. In the past 10 years, we have witnessed a different trend- there has been a dramatic increase in M. bovis associated mastitis amongst dairy cattle. The aim of this study is to utilize WGS to identify and understand the phylogenetic relationships and epidemiology of M. bovis isolates from both local and imported cattle in Israel. We applied WGS to 188 M. bovis isolates, followed by analysis of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and gene content variation. This yielded the first high resolution genome-based epidemiological picture of M. bovis in Israel.