Brachyspira pilosicoli

Brachyspira pilosicoli is a Gram-negative, spiral-shaped, obligate anaerobe bacterium. It is a member of the Spirochaete family. The bacterium is loosely coiled and is 6–11 µm long. It has several flagellae, inserted at either pole of the cell, and a lipopolysaccharide cell wall. It causes intestinal spirochaetosis in pigs, but it has also been isolated from dogs, birds and mice. It causes zoonotic infection in humans, with infection thought to originate from dogs.

Brachyspira pilosicoli
Scientific classification
Domain: Bacteria
Phylum: Spirochaetes
Order: Spirochaetales
Family: Brachyspiraceae
Genus: Brachyspira
Species:
B. pilosicoli
Binomial name
Brachyspira pilosicoli
(Trott & al., 1996) Ochiai & al., 1998
Synonyms[1]
  • Serpulina pilosicoli Trott & al., 1996

Lifecycle and pathogenesis

Infection of B. pilosicoli is acquired the faecal-oral route. Once in the alimentary tract, the bacterium invades its target cells in the large intestine causing oedema, haemorrhage and the infiltration by inflammatory cells. The consequences of this are the sloughing of cells into the intestinal lumen, malabsorption and secretory diarrhoea.

Diseases

B. pilosicoli is the cause of porcine intestinal spirochaetosis. The presence of the spirochaetes in grey-pink diarrhoea is diagnostic.

gollark: What's the ID?
gollark: I would only use it to run you out of RAM...
gollark: You're not running it in CCEmuX, then?
gollark: Other than that.
gollark: Any text appear onscreen?

See also

References
  1. Brachyspira pilosicoli (Trott & al., 1996) Ochiai & al., 1998 in GBIF Secretariat (2017). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei accessed via https://www.gbif.org/species/5428183 on 2019-03-02.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.