Kelly Daryl J, Fuerst Paul A, Richards Allen L
Viral and Rickettsial Diseases Department, Naval Medical Research Center, Silver Spring, MD 20910, USA, and Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
Trop Med Infect Dis. 2019 Apr 30;4(2):75. doi: 10.3390/tropicalmed4020075.
Scrub typhus, a chigger-borne febrile illness, occurs primarily in countries of the Asia-Pacific rim and islands of the Western Pacific. The etiologic agent is the obligate intracellular rickettsial bacterium . Research on has relied on the availability of several prototype strains, which were isolated from human cases of scrub typhus in the 1940s and 1950s. We review the history of the three original, and most important, prototype strains, Gilliam, Karp and Kato, including information on their isolation, their culture history, their clinical characteristics, their importance within the research literature on scrub typhus, and recent advances in elucidating their molecular genomics. The importance of these strains to the research and development of clinical tools related to scrub typhus is also considered. Finally, we examine whether the strains have been genetically stable since their isolation, and whether prototype strains maintained in separate laboratories are identical, based on pairwise comparisons of several sequences from four genes. By using genetic information archived in international DNA databases, we show that the prototype strains used by different laboratories are essentially identical, and that the strains have retained their genetic integrity at least since the 1950s. The three original prototype strains should remain a standard by which new diagnostic procedures are measured. Given their fundamental position in any comparative studies, they are likely to endure as a critical part of present and future research on scrub typhus and .
恙虫病是一种由恙螨传播的发热性疾病，主要发生在亚太地区边缘国家和西太平洋岛屿。病原体是专性细胞内立克次氏体细菌。对[恙虫病病原体]的研究依赖于几种原型菌株的可得性，这些菌株是在20世纪40年代和50年代从人类恙虫病病例中分离出来的。我们回顾了三种最初的、也是最重要的原型菌株——吉列姆（Gilliam）、卡尔普（Karp）和加藤（Kato）的历史，包括它们的分离信息、培养历史、临床特征、在恙虫病研究文献中的重要性以及在阐明其分子基因组学方面的最新进展。还考虑了这些菌株对与恙虫病相关的临床工具研发的重要性。最后，我们基于对四个基因的几个序列进行成对比较，研究了这些菌株自分离以来是否在基因上保持稳定，以及保存在不同实验室的原型菌株是否相同。通过使用国际DNA数据库中存档的遗传信息，我们表明不同实验室使用的原型菌株基本相同，并且这些菌株至少自20世纪50年代以来一直保持其遗传完整性。这三种最初的原型菌株应继续作为衡量新诊断程序的标准。鉴于它们在任何比较研究中的基础地位，它们很可能会作为恙虫病及[恙虫病病原体]当前和未来研究的关键部分而持续存在。
