Typing African relapsing fever spirochetes

Abstract

Relapsing fever Borrelia spp. challenge microbiologic typing because they possess segmented genomes that maintain essential genes on large linear plasmids. Antigenic variation further complicates typing. Intergenic spacer (IGS, between 16S-23S genes) heterogeneity provides resolution among Lyme disease-associated and some relapsing fever spirochetes. We used an IGS fragment for typing East African relapsing fever Borrelia spp. Borrelia recurrentis and their louse vectors showed 2 sequence types, while 4 B. duttonii and their tick vectors had 4 types. IGS typing was unable to discriminate between the tick- and louseborne forms of disease. B. crocidurae, also present in Africa, was clearly resolved from the B. recurrentis/B. duttonii complex. IGS analysis of ticks showed relapsing fever Borrelia spp. and a unique clade, distant from those associated with relapsing fever, possibly equivalent to a novel species in ticks from this region. Clinical significance of this spirochete is undetermined.

Figure 1

Neighbor-joining phylogenetic tree (bootstrap value 250) showing clustering of intergenic spacer (IGS) fragment generated within this study and compared with IGS downloaded from GenBank. Accession nos. DQ000277–DQ000287 were determined in this study.

Figure 2

Neighbor-joining phylogenetic tree (bootstrap value 250) showing clustering of the rrs gene between Borrelia duttonii/B. recurrentis and B. crocidurae.