THE ALTERNATION BETWEEN SPIROCHETE AND CYSTIC FORMS OF THE TICK-BORNE BORRELIOSIS AGENT: ITS RELATIONSHIP TO LYME DISEASE MORBIDITY DYNAMICS

About author:

A. N. Alekseev, Zoological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Universitetskaya emb., 1, 199034 St. Petersburg,
RUSSIA

Acknowledgments:

We would like to thank Joanne Rubel (Phila-delphia, USA) for the assistance and invaluable advice concerning of the life cycle of the Lyme disease agent. Sergei Golovatch (Moscow, Russia) was kind enough as to check the English of an advanced draft.

Annotation:

The long established life cycle pattern in Spi-rochaetacea implies the alternation of a motile spirochete and a cyst depending on the situation. Adverse conditions like starvation in vitro, improp-er pH, low temperature, suppression by increased immunity or drug action in vivo (e.g. salvarsan, antibiotics), etc. are known to result in spirochete cystogeny, whereas such favorable conditions as, e.g., a rich medium in vivo, absence of vertebrate host immunity, blood replenishment by a soft or hard tick vector, etc. provoke the development of motile spirochete. The agent of Lyme disease, or tick-borne borreliosis, being a spirochete, is sug-gested to be no exception in the Borrelia — ixodid tick/vector — human patient system. Based on observations in 1996-2000 at a focus of tick-borne encephalitis and borreliosis near St. Petersburg, Russia, an analysis was performed of the occur-rence frequency of motile Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato in the taiga tick, Ixodes persulcatus Schulze, detected using darkfield microscopy, PCR and IFA techniques. With a total of 3610 ticks analyzed, a positive correlation of adult tick activ-ity (April-July) with soil surface temperature over the season was demonstrated but a negative one with morbidity during May-July. At the same time, PCR positive but live spirochete-negative ticks were 3 times more abundant at the very beginning of the season (end of April beginning of May), when the highest morbidity rate was observed. This allows for the hypothesis to be advanced that, in the hibernating adult ticks, it is the spirochete cystic form that prevails, serving the main source of infection at least during that period. An increased frequency of occurrence of motile spirochetes to-ward the end of the season appears to suppress tick locomotor activity, shortens up to 2 times the lifespan of infected ticks, and decreases the number of Borrelia-infected tick females. This suggests that Borrelia is a true tick parasite, being its competitor in food consumption, i.e. the blood accumulated by the host at the previous stage. As cyst prevalence until early in the season followed by a steady rise in live spirochete population (especially non-patho-genic ones) toward fall correlates most spectacular-ly (Pearson's correlation index 1.000) with a drop in tick morbidity, the main infectious agent in PCR positive but live motile spirochete-negative ticks can be supposed to be the cystic form of Borrelia, especially so after overwintering, at the beginning of the season. A relapse of the disease can thus depend on cyst and motile spirochete alternation. A similar alternation process is apparently typical of Ixodes as well as of Argas ticks.

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