Genomic characteristics, virulence, and antimicrobial resistance in avian pathogenic Escherichia coli MTR_BAU02 strain isolated from layer farm in Bangladesh

BACKGROUND: Colibacillosis, caused by avian pathogenic Escherichia coli (APEC), is one of the most significant infectious diseases affecting poultry worldwide. OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to determine the genomic diversity, virulence factor genes (VFGs), and antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs) in the APEC MTR_BAU02 strain isolated from a layer chicken using whole-genome sequencing (WGS). METHODS: Paired-end (2 × 250) WGS was performed using Illumina MiSeq sequencer (Illumina, San Diego, CA) and de novo assembly was performed using SPAdes. Core genome multilocus sequence typing (cgMLST) analysis between APEC MTR_BAU02 and all of the ST1196 E. coli strains retrieved from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) GenBank database was performed using the BacWGSTdb 2.0 server. We utilized different databases to detect ARGs, VFGs,…