Prevalence of Thermotolerant Campylobacter spp. in Chicken Meat in Croatia and Multilocus Sequence Typing of a Small Subset of Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli Isolates

In order to detect thermotolerant Campylobacter spp., 241 samples of fresh chicken meat, at retail in Croatia, were analysed according to a standard method, followed by biochemical test and molecular polymerase chain reaction/restriction enzyme analysis method for exact species determination. Campylobacter spp. prevalence was 73.86 %. Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli were isolated from 53.53 and 15.35 % of the samples, respectively. In 4.98 % of isolates final species of thermotolerant Campylobacter spp were not determined. The multilocus sequence typing method was used to evaluate genetic diversity of eight Campylobacter jejuni and four Campylobacter coli isolates. To our knowledge, these results of genotyping provided the first data on the presence of sequence types (STs) and clonal complexes (CCs) of Campylobacter jejuni and C. coli isolates in Croatia. By applying the multilocus sequence typing, a new allele of tkt gene locus was discovered and marked as tkt508. The C. jejuni ST 6182 and C. coli ST 6183 genotypes were described for the first time, and all other identified genotypes were clustered in the previously described sequence types and clonal complexes. These findings provide useful information on the prevalence and epidemiology of Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli in Croatia.