On Wednesday, July 18, 2012 8:09:34 PM UTC+2, Phil wrote:
On Tuesday, 10 July 2012 02:58:44 UTC-4, rwst wrote:- 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.
OK. I stand corrected. This and the more recent
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3067508/
should be enough to establish persistence. The fact that it has evolved an iron-free
physiology should be in line with this, too (the other mechanism is to steal iron from
the host via strong siderophores like M. tuberculosis and others).
"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 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.
Not so fast. I thought that only in Europe there were several different strains infecting
people?
Also, while it's easy to find genes specific to those strains, they may not be all expressed,
or while expressed may not be excreted or even accessible on the surface of the bacterium.
And if it is, how do you detect them if the bacterium is inside a host cell? Your antibody blot
may be the best bet that you have.
To optimize detection via PCR of persistent bacteria, one should probably learn from efforts
done with M. tuberculosis instead of reinventing the wheel.
Ralf Stephan
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group.
To post to this group, send email to diybio@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/diybio/-/Ghr1NAil1VIJ.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
0 comments:
Post a Comment