Cryptococcus neoformans and Other Opportunistic Cryptococcus Species in Pigeon Dropping in Saudi Arabia: Identification and Characterization by DNA Sequencing

The prevalent variants of Cryptococcus neoformans, and other Cryptococcus species in pigeon excreta in Western Region of Saudi Arabia were studied. Ninety pigeon dropping samples were plated directly on Niger seed agar, and suspected colonies were sequenced using Illumina MiSeq. Species identification was determined using sequence read mapping to reference genomes of the two C. neoformans variants. In addition, sequence reads were identified using the KmerFinder tool. internal transcribed spacer 2 in the rDNA was also used for fungal barcoding of none of the C. neoformans species using two fungal identification databases. Phylogeny was studied using CSI Phylogeny (Center for Genomic Epidemiology, Denmark). The C. neoformans var. grubii mitochondrion and chromosome 1 reference sequences (accession numbers NC_004336.1 and CP022321.1, respectively) were used for sequence comparison and variant calling. Fifteen Cryptococcus isolates were isolated, 11 were identified as C. neoformans var. grubii, and 4 were found to be other opportunistic Cryptococcus species. Phylogeny analysis of C. neoformans var. grubii isolates showed a high degree of similarity between the C. neoformans isolates especially at the mitochondrial genome level. This study supports the fact that pathogenic and opportunistic Cryptococcus species are prevalent in domestic bird excreta which is an easy source of infection in the susceptible population.