2021-08-24 07:39:01
Summer is the usual honey harvest time, an opportunity for beekeepers to check that their hives are not infected by the American foulbrood. It is the deadliest infectious disease for bees. It is caused by bacteria Paenibacillus larvae, which kills the larvae as they transition to the adult stage. One of the signs of infection of a hive with this disease is the presence of so-called “mosaic” brood, which is characterized by the presence of closed cells in the middle of open and empty cells. In the case of American foulbrood, the closed cells contain dead larvae with a slimy consistency. This bacteria is very contagious. Additionally, antibiotic treatment is not effective in eliminating the disease and is banned in Europe. Infection of a hive with American foulbrood must must be declared to the departmental population protection directorates (DDPP) and most often leads to having to burn the hiveincluding bees.
Sequence the genome to know the origin of infections
The ANSES Sophia Antipolis laboratory is a national reference laboratory and for the European Union on bee health, as well as a reference laboratory for the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) on American foulbrood. In this context, it develops diagnostic and identification methods of several diseases including American foulbrood. He recently developed a new method, based on the complete sequencing of the genome of P. larvae. This work was carried out in collaboration with the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, the National Veterinary Institute of Sweden and the Federal Research Institute for Animal Health in Germany. They were published in the journal Environmental Microbiology. This new method, based on the Core genome multilocus sequence typing (cgMLST) technique, makes it possible to detect differences between strains of P. larvae which are not discerned by the identification methods usually used. This precision will allow us to go back to the origin of infectionsand so better prevent new contamination. Another advantage compared to traditional identification methods is that it is standardizable, and therefore usable by several laboratories. Furthermore, ANSES’s work on American foulbrood is continuing, in particular to better understand the variability of bacterial strains or their virulence.
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