Human infections with Campylobacter are primarily associated with the consumption of contaminated poultry meat. In this study, we isolated Campylobacter
jejuni from retail raw chicken and duck meat in Korea and compared their aerotolerance, antibiotic resistance, and virulence gene prevalence. Whereas C. jejuni isolates from chicken dominantly belonged to multilocus sequence typing (MLST) clonal complex (CC)-21, CC-45 is the common MLST sequence type in duck meat isolates. C. jejuni strains from both chicken and duck meat were highly tolerant to aerobic stress. The prevalence of virulence genes was higher in C. jejuni strains from chicken than those from duck meat. However, antibiotic resistance was higher in duck meat isolates than chicken isolates. Based on the prevalence of virulence genes and antibiotic resistance, fluoroquinolone-resistant C. jejuni strains harboring all tested virulence genes except virB11 were predominant on retail poultry. Fluoroquinolone-resistant C. jejuni strains carrying most virulence genes were more frequently isolated in summer than in winter. The comparative profiling analysis in this study successfully demonstrated that antibiotic-resistant and pathogenic strains of C. jejuni are highly prevalent on retail poultry and that retail duck meat is an important vehicle potentially transmitting C. jejuni to humans in Korea.
Since contaminated poultry meat is the major source of transmitting
Campylobacter jejuni
to humans, the isolation of
Campylobacter
from poultry carcasses is frequently performed in many countries as a baseline survey to ensure food safety. However, existing isolation methods have technical limitations in isolating this fastidious bacterium, such as a growth competition with indigenous bacteria in food samples. In this study, we compared the differences in microbiota compositions between Bolton and Preston selective media, two most common selective media to isolate
Campylobacter
, and investigated how different microbiota compositions resulting from different enrichment methods may affect isolation frequencies. A next-generation sequencing (NGS) analysis of 16S
rRNA
demonstrated that Bolton and Preston-selective enrichments generated different microbiota structures that shared only 31.57% of Operating Taxonomic Unit (OTU) types. Particularly,
Escherichia
was highly prevalent in Bolton selective media, and the enrichment cultures that increase
Escherichia
negatively affected the efficacy of
Campylobacte
r isolation. Furthermore, the combination of the selective media made a significant difference in the isolation frequency. The Bolton broth and Preston agar combination exhibited the highest (60.0%) frequencies of
Campylobacter
isolation, whereas the Bolton broth and Bolton agar combination showed the lowest (2.5%). These results show that each selective medium generates a unique microbiota structure and that the sequence of combining the selective media also critically affects the isolation frequency by altering microbiota compositions. In this study, we demonstrated how a microbiota analysis using NGS can be utilized to optimize a protocol for bacterial isolation from food samples.
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