Urine from clinically healthy dogs is not sterile. Characterizing microbial diversity and abundance within this population of dogs is important to define normal reference ranges for healthy urine. Importantly, these kinds of data might help reshape current therapeutic strategies by not only targeting bacteria identified using conventional culture and sensitivity testing, but also shed light on potentially synergistic roles of fungal species in urine.
Our data show that numerous bacterial species seemingly coexist with a smaller number of fungal species in culture-negative urine collected from clinically healthy dogs.