A comparative study evaluating the efficacy of IS_MAP04 with IS900 and IS_MAP02 as a new diagnostic target for the detection of Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis from bovine faeces.

The aim of this study was to investigate the efficacy of IS_MAP04 as a potential new diagnostic quantitative PCR (qPCR) target for the detection of Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis from bovine faeces. IS_MAP04 primers were designed and tested negative against non-MAP strains. The detection limit of IS_MAP04 qPCR was evaluated on different MAP K-10 DNA concentrations and on faecal samples spiked with different MAP K-10 cell dilutions. A collection of 106 faecal samples was analysed and the efficacy of IS_MAP04 was statistically compared with IS900 and IS_MAP02. The detection limits observed for IS_MAP04 and IS900 on MAP DNA was 34 fg and 3.4 fg respectively. The detection limit of MAP from inoculated faecal samples was 10 CFU/g for both IS_MAP04 and IS900 targets and a detection limit of 10 CFU/g was also achieved with a TaqMan qPCR targeting IS_MAP04. The efficacy of IS_MAP04 to detect positive MAP faecal samples was 83.0% compared to 85.8% and 83.9% for IS900 and IS_MAP02 respectively. Strong kappa agreements were observed between IS_MAP04 and IS900 (κ=0.892) and between IS_MAP04 and IS_MAP02 (κ=0.897). As a new molecular target, IS_MAP04 showed that the detection limit was comparable to IS900 to detect MAP from inoculated faecal material. The MAP detection efficacy of IS_MAP04 from naturally infected faecal samples proved to be relatively comparable to IS_MAP02, but yielded efficacy results slightly less than IS900. Moreover, IS_MAP04 could be of significant value when used in duplex or multiplex qPCR assays.