Enterocytozoon bieneusi subsp. genotypes

Guo, Yaqiong, Li, Na, Feng, Yaoyu & Xiao, Lihua, 2021, Zoonotic parasites in farmed exotic animals in China: Implications to public health, International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife 14, pp. 241-247 : 243

4.1. E. bieneusi genotypes in farmed fur animals

A high genetic diversity is present in E. bieneusi isolates from farmed minks, foxes, and raccoon dogs. Most of these studies have reported multiple genotypes in each species of animals on each farm ( Table 3). Altogether, 25 E. bieneusi genotypes have been found in the small numbers of foxes, racoon dogs and minks examined in northern China. They all belong to Group 1, and many occur in multiple animal species. D, however, appears to be the dominant genotype in farmed fur animals, being found in all but one study ( Table 3). Although concerns have been raised regarding the public health significance of E. bieneusi from fur animals based on the wide occurrence of the well-known zoonotic genotype ( Yang et al., 2015), multilocus characterization of E. bieneusi of ITS genotypes A, D and Type IV at four micro and minisatellites (MS1, MS3, MS4 and MS7) had shown clear genotypic and phylogenetic divergences between isolates of ITS genotype D from fur animals and humans. In fact, in phylogenetic analysis of the multilocus sequence data, genotype D isolates from fur animals formed their own cluster, while human isolates of genotype D clustered together with Type IV from humans from several countries. A third cluster was formed by isolates of the anthroponotic genotype A. While the first two populations had clonal genetic structure, the third population had an epidemic genetic structure ( Li et al., 2016b). The presence of host-segregated E. bieneusi genotypes was supported by MLST analysis of additional isolates from other hosts ( Li et al., 2019a; Liu et al., 2020). These data indicate significant population differentiation of E. bieneusi between fur animals and humans within some of the so-called zoonotic ITS genotypes.