Rickettsia felis
| Rickettsia felis | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Rickettsia felis | ||||||||||||
| Bouyer et al. 2001 |
Rickettsia felis is a pathogen belonging to the genus Rickettsia and causes flea spotted fever .
R. felis is a gram-negative , 0.8–2 × 0.3–0.5 µm large, obligate intracellular bacterium. The cultivation is difficult, it succeeds on XTC2 cells derived from the clawed frog at 28 ° C.
The pathogen was probably first isolated from a cat flea in 1918 and rediscovered in 1990 during screening examinations of cat fleas for Rickettsia typhi in California. The final characterization took place in 2001. Besides the cat flea, R. felis can also be transmitted by the human flea , the dog flea , the hedgehog flea and the rodent flea Anomiopsyllus nudata . In addition to the uptake of the bacterium during suckling by infected mammals, transovarial transmission to the offspring of fleas has also been demonstrated.
Due to the serological reactivity to R. typhi - antibodies was R. felis initially sorted into the typhus group rickettsiae. The bacterium has now been completely sequenced. Genetic analyzes of the shared 17 kDa antigen gene (htrA) and the 16S rRNA suggest that the pathogen belongs to the group of tick bites, in which it is the only non-tick-borne bacterium. The ring chromosome consists of 1486 base pairs and is therefore longer than that of other rickettsiae. The bacterium also contains two plasmids , which is also unusual for rickettsiae .
literature
- Didier Raoult, Philippe Parola: Rickettsial Diseases. CRC Press, 2007, ISBN 978-1-42001997-1 , pp. 87-93.