A pathologist based at a US hospital has found a new strain of Lyme disease using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and DNA sequencing. Found in a patient’s blood sample, the infectious agent was undetectable using standard Lyme disease lab tests.
They found DNA evidence of an unknown Borrelia spirochete in an archived blood sample of a patient diagnosed with and treated for neurologic Lyme disease. The results were published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences.
“The gateway to new DNA sequencing tests is proper polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and we have designed a pair of genus-specific PCR primers to detect all pathogenic spirochetes, including Borrelia burgdorferi, Borrelia miyamotoi and other related borreliae in this group and to prepare the templates for direct DNA sequencing,” said Sin Hang Lee, MD, a Milford Hospital pathologist and lead author of the paper.
The pathologists concluded that a sensitive and reliable DNA-based test is needed to support the diagnosis of Lyme disease and Lyme disease-like borreliosis.
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