The Prevalence of Yeast and Characteristics of the Isolates from the Digestive Tract of Clinically Healthy Turkeys

This study was undertaken to explore the issue of yeast species prevalence in colonizing the gastrointestinal tract of healthy turkeys. The samples were collected from the beak cavity, crop, and cloaca of 5-wk-old turkeys, cultured and classified using morphological, biochemical, and genetic analysis based on ITS1-5.8rRNA-ITS2 fragment sequencing. Out of all the samples, 12.4% were yeast positive. The highest number of strains, 50% of the total collected, were isolated from the crop, with 30.8% coming from the beak cavity and 19.2% from the cloaca. The most frequently isolated yeast belonged to Candida species (88.5%), followed by Trichosporon (7.7%) and Rhodotorula (3.8%). The most prevalent species was Candida catenulata (30.7%), followed by Candida albicans (21.7%), Candida palmioleophila (17.4%), Candida rugosa (17.4%), and Candida glabrata (8.7%). The present study, showing the prevalence of yeast species of the gastrointestinal tract, is a stepping stone to investigating the physiological mycobiota of turkeys' gastrointestinal tract.