Brucella sequence Type 27 isolated from Dwarf Sperm Whale (Kogia sima) stranded in the Costa Rican Pacific Coast

Brucella organisms are Gram-negative, intracellular facultative extracellular bacteria that infect a variety of animals. On March 2018, a pregnant dwarf sperm whale (Kogia sima), stranded and aborted on Herradura beach at the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. K. sima is a criptic species; very little is known of its biology and worldwide distribution, however it is still hunted in Asia. Brucella sp. was recovered from multiple tissues of the female and the calf, and examined by biochemical tests, MLVA-16, brucellader and HRM real time. The isolates were used for whole genome sequencing and the reads were aligned to Brucella abortus 9–941 as the reference, alltogether with other Brucella species. A total of 27 365 variable sites were extracted and a phylogenetic reconstruction by maximum likelihood was produced. The phylogenetic tree revealed that the K. sima isolates are related to Brucella sp. F5/99, a singular strain recovered on 1992 from a bottlenose dolphin captive in California, classified as sequence type (ST) 27 by multi-locus sequence type. This ST27 was described in Brucella isolates with zoonotic capacity and therefore transmission to humans from Peru and New Zealand. This is the first report of Brucella ST27 recovered from a host of the Eastern Tropical Pacific and of Brucella infection in a dwarf sperm whale. Our results shows that the range of marine mammals infected by Brucella sp. is wider than our current knowledge, and that biosafety measures should be increased when handling the stranded mammals, as the zoonotic transmission is of major risk.