Abstract

Amani A. Hafez

The pathogenic Escherichia coli, which causes sheep diarrhea, represents a great concern and great economic losses, especially in desert areas. The aim of this study was to identify some virulence genes and investigate the antibiotic resistance genes isolated from diarrheic sheep collected from north-west coast, Egypt ,A total of 115 (69, 7%) strains of E. coli were isolated , 28 strains were virulent . PCR used for identifying virulence genes revealed iss, sxt1 ,sxt2 , crl, fimH, TraT and pic genes, with detection rates 96,4% (27/28), 67,8% ( 1928) , 78,6% (2228), 64% (1828), 60,7% (1728),57% ( 1628) , and ,28.5% (828) in sequence The results of the antibiotic susceptibility tests indicated that the isolates were sensitive to NIT (97%), NOR (92%), and had high resistance to CTX (92%), E (89%), AMX (85%), followed by GM(82%) ,TE (80%) , TM (71%), NA ( 35,7%), OFX (32%), CIP (28.6%) and DOX (21%) . Detection rates of the resistance genes blaTEM, floR, sul1, aada1, tetA, mcr1, and dfrA, were 64.3%, 28,6%,25%,78,6%,14,3 %,17,8% and 21,4%, respectively. However, qnrA,and aadB were not detected, and no relationship was observed between drug resistance genes and genotypic profile.