Abstract

Most of the studies involved euthanasia of chicks to investigate their intestinal microbial composition as traditional methods. But nowadays, alternative non-invasive sampling methodologies are opted to come over sacrificing the latter. Therefore, in the present study, we tried to assess the prevalence of different bacteria from chicken litter samples collected from different poultry farms and assessed antimicrobial susceptibility of the same. The recovered microorganisms are the representative of the microbiota, which are present in the ileum and caecum of the chicken, Herein, a total of 40 chicken litter and dust samples were collected in the sterile containers from four different poultry farms of Mullana territory; followed by physico-chemical and bacteriological analyses using standard methods. All the samples were cultured on nutrient broth and agar media followed by serial dilutions to determine the colony forming units (CFUs) by spread plate count (SPC) method. Molecular characterization of the bacterial isolates was performed using MALDI-TOF MS while the antibiotic susceptibility testing was performed for all the positive cultures using Kirby-Bauer disk diffusion assay. Results showed a high prevalence of E. coli (n=22, 64.7%) followed by Comamonas kerstersii (n=5, 14.7%), Enterococcus faecium (n=2, 5.8%). One isolate of each of Proteus mirabilis, Bacillus pumilus, Campylobacter jejuni, Citrobacter koserii, and Citrobacter sedlakii were also detected. All the isolates were susceptible to most of the anticrobial tested by disk diffusion assay. In conclusion, non-invasive sampling methods could be opted to detect the microbial community of the operational taxonomic units found in invasive samples of chicken.