Table 1.
Detection of Orientia tsutsugamushi from bats in this study.
Fig 1.
Phylogenetic analysis of Ot strains detected in bats.
Neighbor-joining trees were constructed based on the nucleotide sequences of four genes: (A) 56-kDa TSA, (B) the 47-kDa htrA, (C) GroEL, and (D) 16S rRNA. Sequences obtained in this study are highlighted in red. Reference strains from GenBank include known human and animal isolates from various geographic regions. Scale bars indicate genetic distance based on the number of substitutions per site.
Fig 2.
Quantitative analysis of Ot DNA in different tissues of infected bat samples.
The bacterial loads in heart, kidney, spleen, lung, rectum, liver, and brain tissues of 10 Ot-positive bats were determined using quantitative PCR targeting the 47-kDa htrA gene. Results are expressed as median values with lower quartile and upper quartile (copies/μL). The red dashed line indicates the detection limit of the qPCR assay used in this study.
Fig 3.
Maximum clade credibility (MCC) tree with estimated divergence times based on the 56-kDa TSA gene sequences of Ot.
The tree was generated under a relaxed molecular clock model using BEAST v1.10.4. Red-labeled taxa represent sequences identified in this study. Node bars indicate the 95% highest posterior density (HPD) intervals for divergence time estimates.
Fig 4.
The map on the upper right shows the geographic locations of China and Myanmar. The enlarged map on the left highlights the three sampling sites in Yunnan Province: Ruili City, Yingjiang County, and Gengma County, located along the China-Myanmar border. The maps were generated using QGIS Desktop 3.0.1 software (vector map: geoBoundaries: https://www.geoboundaries.org/globalDownloads.html). The license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.