Table 1.
BAL samples of 13 cats with bronchial disease from Australia.
Table 2.
BAL samples of 11 cats with bronchial disease from northern Italy.
Table 3.
Lung samples of cats from Italy.
Fig 1.
Neighbour-joining phylogenetic tree based on 16S rRNA gene sequences showing the relationships of the organism derived from cats and other Filobacterium spp.
Bootstrap values are displayed in red, based on 1,000 replicates. Bar, 0.01 substitutions per nucleotide position. MW899026 (representative 16S rDNA sequence data of the organisms derived from the three cats) is alligned using ClustalW program with Filobacterium rodentium SMR-CT (type strain and type genus) 16S rRNA gene reference sequence (NR_147732.1) and sequences of putative Filobacterium spp. listed in SILVA SSU r138.1. The aligned data were trimmed by manual inspection (nucleotide position 774 to 891 of NR_147732.1).
Fig 2.
Pie charts of the percentage reads of various constituent 16S rDNA sequences in NGS analysis of feline BALF specimens from cats with lower airway disease and where Filobacterium felis was the preponderant organism.
For consisteny, F. felis reads are shown in navy blue, Mycoplasma felis reads are shown in orange and Ureaoplasma felinum reads are shown in grey. For simplicity, bacteria with reads less than 0.2% were not illustrated.
Fig 3.
Pie charts of the percentage reads of various constituent 16S rDNA sequences in NGS analysis of feline BALF specimens from cats with lower airway disease and where F. felis was not the preponderant organism.
Legend same as for Fig 2.
Fig 4.
F. felis copy number as detected using NGS or qPCR in BALF samples.
A comparison of log10 F.felis copies as detected using NGS or qPCR in BALF samples from 24 cats with lower airway disease (Australia and Northern Italy) compared to 16 necropsy lung specimens from cats in northern Italy. Note that as a generality, cats with lower airway disease tended to have substantially higher copy numbers of F. felis than present in necropsy lung specimens.
Fig 5.
The percentage of NGS reads attributable to F. felis in BALF specimens.
The percentage of NGS reads attributable to F. felis in BALF specimens from 24 cats with lower airway disease comapred to in 16 lung necropsy specimens. It was not uncommon for F. felis to be the preponderant organism in cats with lower respiratory disease, but this was rarely the case in lung specimens from the control necropsy cat, except for the cat that died of intersitial pneumonia.