Delineation of Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato species by multilocus sequence analysis and confirmation of the delineation of Borrelia spielmanii sp. nov

1 Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 12249 Berlin, Germany 2 Institut Pasteur, 75724 Paris, France 3 Baxter Vaccine AG, A-2304 Orth/Donau, Austria Correspondence Dania Richter drichter{at}charite.de To evaluate multilocus sequence analysis (MLSA) for taxonomic purposes in the delineation of species within Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato , seven relevant loci of various strains for which extensive DNA–DNA reassociation data were available were sequenced. MLSA delineation proved to be fully concordant with conventional methods. Our analysis confirmed the delineation of a novel species, Borrelia spielmanii sp. nov., previously known as ‘ Borrelia spielmani ’ Richter et al . 2004, with strain PC-Eq17N5 T (=DSM 16813 T =CIP 108855 T ) as the type strain. Abbreviations: MLEE, multilocus enzyme electrophoresis; MLSA, multilocus sequence analysis; MLST, multilocus sequence typing; WDDH, whole DNA–DNA hybridization Published online ahead of print on 9 December 2005 as DOI 10.1099/ijs.0.64050-0. The GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ accession numbers for the fla , groEL , hbb , ospA , recA , rrs and rrf–rrl intergenic spacer gene sequences of Borrelia spielmanii sp. nov. PC-Eq17N5 T are DQ133508 , DQ133511 , DQ133514 , DQ133517 , DQ133520 , DQ133523 and DQ133526 , respectively. Accession numbers for other gene sequences obtained in this study are given in Supplementary Table S2 in IJSEM Online. Tables detailing similarity values for concatenated sequences of species within Borrelia burgdorferi s.l. and GenBank accession numbers for gene sequences derived in this study are available as supplementary material in IJSEM Online.