Prevalence and antibiotic resistance profiling of Salmonella sero-types isolated from sheep in Al-Najaf governorate, Iraq

ABSTRACT In sheep, salmonella infection is one of the most prevalent causes of diarrhea and it is one of the most source of meat for human consumption Yet. comprehensive studies to assess the distribution of salmonella species in sheep are scares in this country, especially in this governorate and lack of an overall assessment of salmonella population in sheep. Therefore, A cross-sectional study aimed to determine salmonella species/serotypes population structure and their antimicrobial resistance rate in sheep in Najaf Governorate was conducted. 648 rectal swabs belonging to 9 flocks of sheep, were collected and subjected to phenotypic and molecular techniques in order to detect salmonella serotypes by targeting genomic region (rrnH) operon containing interspersed sequences, using PCR technique followed by pyrosequencing, 36 (5.5%) strains were identified, belongs to two serotypes were detected by using Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLASTn) DNA based sequence search against GenBank repositories, accordingly, S. Agona and S. Albany were identified. S. Agona was the most prevalent strain 34 (94%) in all ages the higher percentage was in age of one month. The antibiotics susceptibility testing by using disc diffusion method and 13 antimicrobial agents revealed high resistance rate, the MAR index values ranged from (0.15 to 0.46) and Multi Drug Resistance (MDR) rate was high 88.9%.Keywords: Resistance Profiling, Salmonella Serotypes, Shee