On Tuesday, 10 July 2012 02:58:44 UTC-4, rwst wrote:
On Monday, July 9, 2012 6:49:36 PM UTC+2, Phil wrote:It would be nice to have a reliable test for Lyme. Some issues that need to be addressed:
- What cell types does the bacterium inhabit? In particular, which cell types does it hide out in while a patient is on antibiotics?
None and none. It completely lives in extracellular space, fortunately, but appears quite mobile.
Negative. It's a spirochete. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC257809/,
"Intracellular localization of Borrelia burgdorferi within human endothelial cells,"
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease_microbiology#Mechanisms_of_persistence
for a list of other cell types that the Borrelia spirochete invades.
What is the best area to sample for a Lyme test?
After infection, the wound. After months, it gets diffcult.
Right; only the "after months" question is interesting.
- What would be a good PCR test to use that would detect all the known varieties of Lyme with a single test?
That is to be seen. Promising would be liquor but that's not for the amateur.
Maybe you get traces of bacterial DNA in the blood but you don't know which genes. Only a professional study can determine that (except when sequencing gets really cheap or maybe a B.burgdorferi microarray is available)
What I meant was, what would be a good set of PCR primers to use,
which would detect all known variants of Lyme but not other bacterial infections?
That is something an amateur could figure out, from the sequences for the different strains,
which are available in GenBank. AFAIK it hasn't been done.
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