For the first time, scientists have directly observed the adherence and release of the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Lyme disease, according to a report released on June 19, 2008 in the open access journal PLoS Pathogens.

B. burgdorferi is a bacterium of the spirochete class which causes Lyme disease. It is transmitted predominantly by ticks in North America. Spirochete bacteria are characterized by their helically coiled shape. Pathogenic spirochetes are the cause of several diseases worldwide, including syphilis, leptospirosis, relapsing fever, and Lyme disease. The mechanism by which they travel from the blood of the host to the target sites of infection is as of yet unknown, but visualization of this process could help yield important insight into the disease process.

This team, composed of microbiologists at the University of Calgary, were able to visualize, in three dimensions, in real time, spirochete dissemination in a living mammalian host. To do this, they watched an engineered fluorescent strain of B. burgdorferi using both conventional and spinning disk confocal microscopy to observe the movement of the bacteria and the vascular wall in mice. Vascular escape, they discovered, is a process with multiple stages, and the movements of these spirochetes is important when the bacterium disseminates to target tissue sites from the blood. By understanding this, the disease mechanism of spirochetes such as B. burgdorferi can be better understood.

Real-Time High Resolution 3D Imaging of the Lyme Disease Spirochete Adhering to and Escaping from the Vasculature of a Living Host.
Moriarty TJ, Norman MU, Colarusso P, Bankhead T, Kubes P, et al.
PLoS Pathog 4(6): e1000090.
doi:10.1371/journal.ppat.1000090
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Written by Anna Sophia McKenney