Comparative RNA-seq analysis of the Tritrichomonas foetus PIG30/1 isolate from pigs reveals close association with Tritrichomonas foetus BP-4 isolate ‘bovine genotype’

Bulky Trichomonad Genomes: Encoding a Swiss Army Knife

“…Thousands of T. vaginalis genes exist as paralogous copies [33] and transcriptome studies on D. fragilis [18], H. meleagridis [14] and Tri. foetus [16,32] have confirmed that gene expansion is a conserved feature across the trichomonad group. Notably, orthologous genes are often duplicated ( Figure 4, Table 1), implying that some duplications occurred in an ancestral trichomonad prior to speciation.…”

“…While some duplicated trichomonad genes have certainly undergone this silencing process [31], many have remained functional, and perhaps Darwinian evolutionary theory holds true in their case. This is supported by the fact that: (1) evidence of transcription exists for many of these genes; (2) many genes appear to be full length based on homology and possess appropriate translation initiation and stop signals; and (3) when translated, many of these transcripts possess conserved functional domains [14,[16][17][18]31,32]. Furthermore, despite the reductive evolution observed in the Dientamoebidae (Figures 1 and 2) [2], this family still possesses the same expanded gene groups as T. vaginalis and Tri.…”

“…By comparison, the gut flagellate Giardia has an estimated genome size of 11.5-11.7 Mb [25,26], and the gut amoebae Entamoeba histolytica and Entamoeba dispar have genomes between 21 and 22 Mb [27,28]. This remarkable expansion in trichomonad genome size reflects the large number of gene duplications, repeats, transposable elements (TEs) and pseudogenes they possess [8,14,[16][17][18][29][30][31][32][33].…”

Tritrichomonas foetus and Mycoplasma felis coinfection in the upper respiratory tract of a cat with chronic purulent nasal discharge

“…To the best of our knowledge, this is the first case report of T foetus as a coinfecting agent with M felis upper respiratory tract infection in the nasal cavity of a cat with chronic purulent nasal discharge. Although T foetus has been described as a commensal gastrointestinal and nasal cavity tract organism of pigs, before it has been recognized as a cause of bovine reproductive tract disease …”

“…Although T foetus has been described as a commensal gastrointestinal and nasal cavity tract organism of pigs, before it has been recognized as a cause of bovine reproductive tract disease. 14 In the present case, we considered that M felis was the primary pathogen of the upper respiratory tract and that T foetus was a secondary invader; however, mycoplasmas are well-known opportunistic pathogens, so the opposite scenario is also possible.…”