Abstract
Whipple's disease is a systemic disorder associated with a cultivation-resistant, poorly characterized actinomycete, Tropheryma whippelii. We determined a nearly complete rRNA operon sequence of T. whippelii from specimens from 3 patients with Whipple's disease, as well as partial operon sequences from 43 patients. Variability was observed in the 16S-23S rRNA spacer sequences, leading to the description of five distinct sequence types. One specimen contained two spacer sequence types, raising the possibility of a double infection. Secondary structure models for the primary rRNA transcript and mature rRNAs revealed rare or unique features.
Highlights
Whipple’s disease was described in 1907 and is a multisystem disorder of humans involving the intestinal tract as well as various other organs [3]
The spacer region was found to be homogenous in specimens from 9 Swiss individuals; in the second study, three types of intergenic spacers were detected in specimens from 28 individuals
3296 NOTES ing to differences between sequence types 2 and 5. These findings suggest that both sequence types were present in the patient’s specimen and raise two possibilities: either the bacterium has more than one rRNA operon, or the patient was infected by two different bacterial strains
Summary
Whipple’s disease was described in 1907 (as intestinal lipodystrophy) and is a multisystem disorder of humans involving the intestinal tract as well as various other organs [3]. A nearly complete rRNA operon sequence, spanning 5,747 bp, was assembled from PCR products from the intestinal biopsy specimen of a patient with Whipple’s disease (patient 1 [17]). Two additional nearly complete operon sequences of 5,722 bp each, ending with primer tw5745r (Table 1), were determined from a postmortem brain tissue specimen (patient 2) and from a CSF sample (patient 3).
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