Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-2016

MeSH Terms

Lyme disease/physiology, Borrelia burgdorferi, Biofilms

Subject: LCSH

Borrelia burgdorferi, Biofilms

Disciplines

Biology | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Abstract

Borrelia burgdorferi, the causative agent of Lyme disease, is capable of forming biofilm in vivo and in vitro, a structure well known for its resistance to antimicrobial agents. For the formation of biofilm, signaling processes are required to communicate with the surrounding environment such as it was shown for the RpoN—RpoS alternative sigma factor and for the LuxS quorum-sensing pathways. Therefore, in this study, the wild-type B. burgdorferi and different mutant strains lacking RpoN, RpoS, and LuxS genes were studied for their growth characteristic and development of biofilm structures and markers as well as for their antibiotic sensitivity. Our results showed that all three mutants formed small, loosely formed aggregates, which expressed previously identified Borrelia biofilm markers such as alginate, extracellular DNA, and calcium. All three mutants had significantly different sensitivity to doxycyline in the early log phase spirochete cultures; however, in the biofilm rich stationary cultures, only LuxS mutant showed increased sensitivity to doxycyline compared to the wild-type strain. Our findings indicate that all three mutants have some effect on Borrelia biofilm, but the most dramatic effect was found with LuxS mutant, suggesting that the quorum-sensing pathway plays an important role of Borrelia biofilm formation and antibiotic sensitivity.

Comments

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author and source are credited. Published in European Journal of Microbiology and Immunology.

DOI

10.1556/1886.2016.00026

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Publisher Citation

Sapi, E., Theophilus, P. A., Pham, T. V., Burugu, D., & Luecke, D. F. (2016). Effect of rpon, rpos and luxs pathways on the biofilm formation and antibiotic sensitivity of Borrelia burgdorferi. European Journal of Microbiology and Immunology, 1-15.

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