Seroprevalence and molecular characterization of Toxoplasma gondii infecting ruminants in the North-West of Egypt.

Toxoplasma gondii is a coccidian parasite known for its heavy toll on people and livestock. It can cause abortion and a variety of congenital diseases. The current study aimed to examine some seroprevalence and molecular attributes of T. gondii obtained from ruminants in the North-West of Egypt. Specimens were random selected from five different locations in Alexandria and Matrouh governorates. A total of 483 blood samples, collected from 96 mixed flocks, were screened for anti-T. gondii IgG antibodies using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The seropositive results were then confirmed using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) primers for the B1 and P30 genes. Specific PCR products were selected for sequencing and alignment against the GenBank, where phylogeny has been examined using the maximum likelihood, neighbor-joining, and maximum parsimony in MEGA6. ELISA confirmed the presence of T. gondii in 188 of the investigated samples (38.92%), indicating a higher prevalence in camels (64.51%) and sheep (43.75%) as compared to goats (27.93 %) and cattle (13.46%). PCR confirmed the presence of T. gondii-specific sequences in 159 seropositive specimens, with homology between 98.3 and 100%. The genetic distances between the investigated variants ranged from 0.1 to 0.9, and 7 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), were identified in the examined T. gondii specimens. The camel T. gondii parasite, isolated from Matrouh, showed a 100% homology with the most dangerous reference strains of T. gondii-RH in the GenBank. Our results showed that B1 and P30-specific PCR could detect T. gondii in blood samples more accurately than ELISA. In addition, the statistical analysis of our data indicated that species, age, sex, and animal location were all risk factors for toxoplasmosis. These findings are likely to boost disease control and help contain the spread of T. gondii infections.

Molecular changes in Trypanosoma evansi after treatment against trypanosomosis.

Neither physiological nor pathological changes following treatments explained why trypanosomes in the same group of experimentally treated animals correlated in virulence. Also, they behaved like each other but not similar to other groups despite the same T. evansi injected strain. The current study aims to discuss whether molecular changes might occur to Trypanosoma evansi isolates followed treatments are responsible for that difference or not. Ten preserved isolates from T. evansi after previous treatments besides the original strain of T. evansi that injected before treatments were used in the present study. These isolates were intraperitoneally inoculated in 11 groups of male Wister Albino rats with equal doses. Parasitological findings and the molecular changes accompanied were discussed along with the experiment based on PCR-TR3/TR4 specific-primers. The study also achieved alignments, gene sequence and phylogenetic analysis for submitted and reference strains belong to T. evansi, T. brucei, T. b. brucei, and T. b. gambiense deposited in GenBank. The present results assessed molecularly the effectiveness and highly antitrypanosomal activity of human plasmas O+ and A+ on T. evansi than others, and how their strains drifted from its original sequence to the nearest form of T. brucei. At the same time, T. evansi in other plant extract groups multiplied progressively like cancer cells and became more virulent and close to reference strains of T. evansi. Our data further indicated that T. evansi after treatment was a paraphyletic group. It also corroborated the antitrypanosomal activityspecificity and the molecular changes occurring were correlated to the type of treatment.