In recent years, there has been a renewed effort to study swine chlamydiae, both because there is an increased awareness of chlamydial diseases and because we now have improved methods of isolation. Six different strains of chlamydiae have been isolated from cases of enteritis, pneumonia, and conjunctivitis in nursing, nursery, and finishing pigs. These isolates are all of the C. trachomatis ty...

Disorders of gut function are among the most prevalent problems presented to physicians practicing in gastroenterology as well as primary care physicians and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is the most common functional gastrointestinal disorder. There is no biomarker of IBS. Instead, the diagnosis is based on symptom criteria and the absence of an organic cause for symptoms (Longstreth et al., ...

The Chlamydiae phylum exclusively encompasses bacteria sharing a similar obligate intracellular life cycle. Existing 16S rDNA data support a high diversity within the phylum, however genomic data remain scarce owing to the difficulty in isolating strains using culture systems with eukaryotic cells. Yet, Chlamydiae genome data extracted from large scale metagenomic studies might help fill this g...

Chlamydiae are unusual obligate intracellular bacteria that cause serious infections in humans. Chlamydiae contain genes that appear to encode products with peptidoglycan biosynthetic activity. The organisms are also susceptible to antibiotics that inhibit peptidoglycan synthesis. However, chlamydiae do not synthesize detectable peptidoglycan. The paradox created by these observations is known ...

Three touchdown enzyme time release (TETR)-PCR assays were used to amplify different DNA sequences in the variable regions of the 16S and 16S-23S spacer rRNA genes specific for Chlamydia trachomatis, Chlamydia pneumoniae, and Chlamydia psittaci as improved tests for sensitive diagnosis and rapid species differentiation. The TETR-PCR protocol used 60 cycles of amplification, which provided impro...

Ancient chlamydiae diverged into pathogenic and environmental chlamydiae 0.7-1.4 billion years ago. However, how pathogenic chlamydiae adapted to mammalian cells that provide a stable niche at approximately 37 °C, remains unknown, although environmental chlamydiae have evolved as endosymbionts of lower eukaryotes in harsh niches of relatively low temperatures. Hence, we assessed whether an envi...

Novel chlamydiae are newly recognized members of the phylum Chlamydiales that are only distantly related to the classic Chlamydiaceae, i.e., Chlamydia and Chlamydophila species. They also exhibit an obligate biphasic intracellular life cycle within eukaryote host cells. Some of these new chlamydiae are currently considered potential emerging human and/or animal pathogens. Parachlamydia acantham...

and Atherosclerosis? To the Editor: The study of Bea et al,1 recently published in Circulation Research, investigated the role of Chlamydia pneumoniae infection in mouse macrophages on the induction of tissue factor (TF) via activation of Egr-1. Chlamydial infection of RAW mouse macrophages clearly resulted in enhanced Egr-1 protein expression and a subsequent time-dependent increase in TF mRNA...