Molecular Characterization of Staphylococcus aureus Strains Isolated from Bovine Subclinical and Clinical Mastitis in Italy

摘要

Staphylococcus aureus is a major challenge in dairy production to manage and treat. This contagious pathogen, frequently isolated from milk samples of cows with subclinical but also clinical mastitis, can harbor a wide array of genes related to its capability to cause disease and to acquire antibiotic resistance. The expression of the virulence associated genes, comprising those encoding enterotoxins (SEs), can be responsible for reducing the effectiveness of host innate immunity system (Magro et al., 2017), while resistance to antibiotics and, particularly, to methicillin is mediated by mecA gene (Luini et al., 2015). S. aureus virulence and antimicrobial resistance profiles are highly associated to specific genotypes (Cremonesi et al., 2015). Theaim of this study was to determine the presence of different genotypic clusters, of selected enterotoxin genes and the methicillin resistance gene in S. aureus isolates recovered from cases of subclinical and clinical mastitis occurring in cows on Italian herds.