Bordetellosis or turkey coryza, caused by Bordetella avium, has been an issue for the turkey industry since the first description in 1967. Bordetella avium causes highly contagious upper respiratory disease in turkeys and could play a role of either a primary or an opportunistic pathogen. On the other hand, it has been recently shown that some strains of Bordetella hinzii might be pathogenic for turkeys, too. Therefore, this study aimed to isolate and characterize both species from commercial and backyard turkey poults in Tehran, Isfahan and Northern provinces of Iran. To do so, 625 tracheal swabs were taken from 425 two to six-week-old commercial poults and 200 two to six-week-old backyard poults from September 2016 to September 2018. The swabs were immediately cultured on MacConkey agar and Blood agar plates, and then every five swabs were pooled in tubes containing 2mL of distilled water for direct PCR for both Bordetella avium and Bordetella hinzii. 17 swab pools were positive with Bordetella avium PCR, but no Bordetella hinzii was found in this study. Due to the duality of the PCR product, seven positive samples were sequenced for the region flanking of the piuA gene, and the phylogenetic tree was drawn with p-distance based Neighbor-joining method (1000 Bootstrap) using Mega software version 7. The analysis of the sequences indicated that the sequences were 98% similar to Bordetella avium 197N (AM167904.1) sequence and 96 and 98% similar to Bordetella avium strain 4142 (AY925058.1) and Bordetella avium strain 4156 (AY925068.1), respectively. To the best of our knowledge, the current study is the first study on Both Bordetella avium and Bordetella hinzii with the molecular detection and characterization of Bordetella avium in Iran. Further studies on these two organisms to isolate, characterize and differentiate the regional isolates are greatly recommended in order to help the developing turkey industry of Iran meeting the increasing demands for protein.

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