Nucleotide alignment and phylogenetic tree illustrating tick-derived Mycoplasma cynos
Data files
May 08, 2025 version files 729.71 KB
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M_cynos_LST_012925.aln
600.19 KB
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M_cynos_LST_012925.tre
127.85 KB
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README.md
1.66 KB
Abstract
Mycoplasma cynos is a significant bacterial pathogen within the Canine Infectious Respiratory Disease Complex (CIRD), causing substantial morbidity worldwide in pet and kennel dog populations. While its role as both a primary and secondary pathogen in respiratory disease is established, the epidemiology and potential for vector-borne transmission of M. cynos remains understudied. Here we describe an identified association of M. cynos with a lone star tick, Amblyomma americanum L., collected in New Jersey, USA using a next-generation metabarcoding approach. Sequence identity and phylogenetic analysis confirmed its provenance as a canine-derived M. cynos strain, and to our knowledge represents the first identification of this pathogen in ticks. These findings suggest a potential tick-mediated epidemiological link between canine hosts and the environment, underlining the need for further studies on tick-borne transmission dynamics and their role in the broader ecology of canine and wildlife respiratory pathogens.
Dataset DOI: 10.5061/dryad.0p2ngf2bg
Description of the data and file structure
Nucleotide sequence alignment (.fasta) and phylogenetic tree associated with Moustafa et al. 2025 J. Med Ent "Molecular detection of a canine respiratory pathogen, Mycoplasma cynos, in the lone star tick Amblyomma americanum (Acari: Ixodidae)".
The consensus 16S PCR amplicon identified in our study as M. cynos (424 bp in length; DDBJ accession LC860823) was queried via BLASTn analysis against the NCBI ‘nt’ nucleotide database (e-val = 1 x 10^-5) to confirm species identity. A taxonomically broad set of 866 top hits from 743 bacterial isolates (inclusive of multiple 16S loci from the same isolate) derived from various Mycoplasmataceae were retrieved and aligned using MAFFT-linsi for phylogenetic analysis. The resulting alignment was manually inspected and trimmed at the 5’ and 3’ ends to span the full length of our query (424 bp) for comparative analysis. A maximum likelihood (ML) phylogenetic tree was constructed from the alignment using the aligned 16S rRNA sequences in IQTREE v2.0 under automatic model selection (the GTR+F+I+G4 was selected based on the lowest Bayesian Information Criterion score). Branch support values were assessed with 2,000 rapid bootstrap approximations.
Files and variables
File: M_cynos_LST_012925.tre
Description: Phylogenetic tree derived using IQTREE (text)
File: M_cynos_LST_012925.aln
Description: Nucleotide sequence alignment produced by MAFFT-linsi (.fasta)