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. 2023 Jun 30;9(7):720.
doi: 10.3390/jof9070720.

Candida auris in Dog Ears

Anamika Yadav  1   2 , Yue Wang  3 , Kusum Jain  1   2 , Vijay Amrit Raj Panwar  4 , Hardeep Kaur  2 , Vikas Kasana  1 , Jianping Xu  3 , Anuradha Chowdhary  1
Affiliations

Candida auris in Dog Ears

Anamika Yadav et al. J Fungi (Basel). .

Abstract

Candida auris is an emerging global public health threat and is resistant to most antifungal agents. Though fungi are significant pathogens for animals, the role of C. auris in animal health remains unexplored. Here, we analysed the microbial cultures of skin and ear swabs of 87 dogs in Delhi and performed fungal meta-barcode sequencing of ear and skin samples of 7 dogs with confirmed otitis externa (OE). Overall, 4.5% of dogs (4/87) with chronic skin infections contained evidence of C. auris in their ear canal (n = 3) and on their skin surface (n = 1). Of the three OE dogs with C. auris infection/colonisation, a diversity of fungi was observed, and their meta-barcode ITS sequence reads for C. auris ranged from 0.06% to 0.67%. Whole-genome sequencing of six C. auris strains obtained in culture from two dogs showed relatedness with Clade I clinical strains. The report highlights the isolation of C. auris from an animal source; however, the routes of transmission of this yeast to dogs and the clinical significance of transmission between dogs and humans remain to be investigated.

Keywords: Candida auris; ITS; dogs; meta-barcode sequencing; otitis externa; whole-genome sequencing.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Heatmap showing the distribution of the 28 most common fungal genera in ear and skin samples from seven dogs and one healthcare worker. Different intensities of colours represent the percent read abundance of a genus in each sample. The dendrogram on the left is to indicate the similarity between different genera based on their read abundance profiles. Genera that are closer together on the dendrogram share more similar abundance patterns in our samples. The dendrogram on the top represents the clustering and relationships between the different samples based on their read abundance profiles of listed genera. Samples that are closer together on the dendrogram share more similar read abundance profiles.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Genetic relationships of C. auris isolates from dog ears and clade I strains from other countries inferred based on concatenated genome-wide SNPs. Branches with bootstrap support over 0.95 are highlighted in purple. Indian strains were labelled with triangles in various colours to indicate their isolation sources. The inner colour strips specify the geographic location of the isolates.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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