| dc.description.abstract | With sheep being one of the most important livestock in Norway the health and well-being of the animals is important. Working towards a better understanding of what bacterial finds one might expect in healthy sheep could help improve their health as well as the health of the handlers and other livestock that is in contact with sheep. One reason being that treatment of many diseases is based on what pathogen is found or associated with it. Also, preventative measurements could be done by knowing what pathogen causes disease and in what environment it is commonly found. In the last few decades, the technology within the biology and chemistry fields has made large leaps and genomic databases are publicly available making identification of organisms faster, cheaper, and more easily available then before.
As a part of a larger project done at the University of Stavanger looking to describe the prevalence of Mycoplasma ovipneumonia in sheep with signs of pneumonia after slaughter, this study was designed to cultivate and identify bacterial findings of nasal swab sampled collected from healthy male sheep in Western Norway to get a better understanding of the microbiome in the respiratory tracts. Bacteria was cultivated before extracting, amplification and cleaning the 16S rRNA genes DNA. This DNA was then sequenced with Sanger sequencing and the data were analysed, processed, and used in a nucleotide identity search with the BLASTn (NCBI) search engine. Bacterial findings in this study resulted in 10 different finds from 14 successful sequenced samples, Staphylococcus aureus, Staphylococcus equorum, Staphylococcus xylosus, Moraxella ovis, Moraxella lacunata, Moraxella osloensis, Bacillus safensis, Bacillus, Citrobacter freundii and Salmonella enterica. A literature search was done bases on these species and the occurrence in both healthy and sick sheep.
It was concluded that even though the literature is scarce with regards to these bacteria causing infection in sheep, there are cases where infection has happened in sheep or other animals and could be a potential health risk and should be investigated further. Additionally, some of the literature found is also based on old technology and methods from the early 1970-90s such as identification based on morphology and selective growth medium instead of nucleotide sequencing and should also be revisited with newer methods and technology. | |