Journal: BMC Microbiology
Article Title: First human cell-based cultivation system for the syphilis spirochete Treponema pallidum
doi: 10.1186/s12866-026-04856-5
Figure Lengend Snippet: Human foreskin fibroblast cell lines support the growth of T. pallidum in vitro . A Human foreskin fibroblast cell lines (MoNa, HFF1, and HFFC) support the growth of T. pallidum in long-term, continuous, in vitro cultivation. While cultivation of strain SS14 was discontinued after 10 weeks, in vitro cultures of the DAL-1 strain have been ongoing for over one year. During this period, scheme of subcultures was optimized (up to 1:20). A booster passage (*), extending the standard 7-day subculture to a 14-day period with a cultivation medium exchange on day 7, was employed to enrich the treponemal culture during critical declines. In vitro cultivation was performed in triplicate (i.e., in three cultivation wells) and the mean values for each subculture are presented in graph. Source data from individual wells are shown in Supplementary Table . B Parallel cultivation for seven days ( n = 15) with defined DAL-1 inoculum (10 6 treponemes) validated the differences in growth support of individual foreskin cell lines. Treponemal growth on human foreskin fibroblast cells was slower compared to growth on rabbit epithelial Sf1Ep cells. Red bar, mean. C Human foreskin-based cultivation system supports the growth of various T. pallidum strains ( n = 8), from the Nichols-like as well as the SS14-like cluster. Note that human foreskin fibroblast cells were prepared as an equal mixture of three tested cell lines. Each T. pallidum strain was cultivated in a single in vitro well, representing a sole experimental replicate used for data acquisition
Article Snippet: Human foreskin fibroblasts HFF1 (SCRC-1041; ATCC) and HFFC (300715; Cytion) were purchased, while the third cell line (MoNa) was kindly provided by Dr. Vladimir Rotrekl (Masaryk University), and was originally obtained from the National Tissue Centre (Czech Republic).
Techniques: In Vitro