| Species/Subspecies: | Borrelia burgdorferi | ||||||||
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| Categories: | Zoonotic; motile | ||||||||
| Etymology: | Genus name: named after the French bacteriologist Amédée Borrel (1867-1936). Species epithet: named after Willy Burgdorfer, who in 1981 found spirochetes in ticks from the area around Old Lyme (Connecticut, USA) and associated the finding to the disease (Lyme disease). | ||||||||
| Significance: | [Very important] | ||||||||
| Taxonomy: | Class Spirochaetia Order Spirochaetales Family Spirochaetaceae Genus Borrelia |
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| Type Strain: | B31 = ATCC 35210 | ||||||||
| Macromorphology (smell): | |||||||||
| Micromorphology:
| Borrelia spp. have a planar flat-wave morphology. B. burgdorferi is 0.33 x 10-20 µm in size with 3-10 waves. Has 7-11 periplasmic flagella (endoflagella or axial filaments) at each cell end and is very motile. | ||||||||
| Gram +/Gram -: | G-, difficult to stain | ||||||||
| Metabolism: | Microaerophilic | ||||||||
| Catalase/Oxidase: | |||||||||
| Spec. Char.: | |||||||||
| Vector:
| Tick borne, in Sweden usually by Ixodes ricinus but can most likely also be transferred by Ixodes hexagonus | ||||||||
| Disease: |
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| Genome Sequence: |
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| 16S rRNA Seq.: |
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| Taxonomy/phylogeny:
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About 40 different species have been described within the genus Borrelia and about half of these (among others B. afzelii and B. garinii ave been affiliated to B. burgdorferi sensu lato, which means B. burgdorferi in a wider sense. B. burgdorferi sensu stricto, in this context, means only the species B. burgdorferi. | ||||||||
| Comment: | The disease was first described in 1975. | ||||||||
| Updated: | 2023-03-08 |