About Bartonella Quintana

artonella quintana is a Gram-negative, fastidious bacterium. Human is the only identified reservoir and the human body louse, pediculus humanus corporis, is its vector. B. quintana is responsible for a wide spectrum of clinical presentations, including trench fever, endocarditis, chronic bacteremia, and bacillary angiomatosis. B. quintana infection occurs in conditions such as poverty and lack of hygiene, allowing the development of body lice infestation, and is thus prevalent in the homeless population. Bacillary angiomatosis may occur in both HIV-infected and immunocompetent patients.

Although criteria exist to classify Bartonella isolates as new species or not, there is a need for a method able to reliably identify B. quintana at the strain level. Such a method would allow investigating whether epidemic strains occur in homeless people, and the geographic heterogeneity of B. quintana isolates. Only pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) has been used previously for B. quintana typing on a limited number of strains. Surprisingly, the locations of restriction sites of the cutting endonuclease used for PFGE did not match with the sizes of the fragments obtained with PFGE. This was determined from the analysis of the recently sequenced 1.6-Mb genome of B. quintana, and emphasizes the need for more reproducible and convenient typing methods. Sequence-based methods have the advantages of being applicable to clinical or environmental specimens, and to produce reproducible and comparable results.

MST was set up from the amplification and sequence of 34 spacers in a collection of 71 isolates, allowing the characterization of 4 genotypes. Direct typing of environmental specimens allowed the identification of a fifth genotype. MST using only 2 spacer sequences allows the identification of the 5 genotypes.

Publication

• 2005-01-01Multispacer typing technique for sequence-based typing of Bartonella quintanaFoucault C, La Scola B, Lindroos H, Andersson SGE, Raoult D
• 2007-04-11Analysis of the first Australian strains of Bartonella quintana reveals unique genotypesWoolley MW, Gordon DL, Wetherall BL