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Comparative Study
. 1999 Mar;37(3):565-9.
doi: 10.1128/JCM.37.3.565-569.1999.

Genetic diversity of Borrelia burgdorferi in lyme disease patients as determined by culture versus direct PCR with clinical specimens

D Liveris  1 , S Varde, R Iyer, S Koenig, S Bittker, D Cooper, D McKenna, J Nowakowski, R B Nadelman, G P Wormser, I Schwartz
Affiliations
Comparative Study

Genetic diversity of Borrelia burgdorferi in lyme disease patients as determined by culture versus direct PCR with clinical specimens

D Liveris et al. J Clin Microbiol. 1999 Mar.

Abstract

Two hundred seventeen isolates of Borrelia burgdorferi originally cultured from skin biopsy samples or blood of early Lyme disease patients were genetically characterized by PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) typing of the 16S-23S ribosomal DNA intergenic spacer. Three major RFLP types were observed. Of the cultured isolates, 63 of 217 (29.0%) were type 1, 85 of 217 (39.2%) were type 2, and 58 of 217 (26.7%) were type 3; mixtures of two RFLP types were obtained in 6.0% (13 of 217) of the cultures. Comparison of typing of B. burgdorferi performed directly on 51 patient skin specimens with typing of cultures originally isolated from the same tissue revealed that a much larger proportion of direct tissue samples had mixtures of RFLP types (43.1% by direct typing versus 5.9% by culture [P < 0.001). In addition, identical RFLP types were observed in only 35.5% (11 of 31) of the paired samples. RFLP type 3 organisms were recovered from blood at a significantly lower rate than were either type 1 or type 2 strains. These studies demonstrate that the genetic diversity of B. burgdorferi patient isolates as determined by cultivation differs from that assessed by PCR performed directly on patient tissue.

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Figures

FIG. 1
FIG. 1
Annual distribution of cultured isolates by RFLP type. Type 1, solid bars; type 2, striped bars; type 3, open bars. No blood isolates were obtained in 1991.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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