Specific clones of Trichomonas tenax are associated with periodontitis

Sarah Benabdelkader (1) , Julien Andreani (1) , Alexis Gillet (2) , Elodie Terrer (1) , Marion Pignoly (2) , Herve Chaudet (1) , Gérard Aboudharam (1) , Bernard La Scola (1)

1 MEPHI - Microbes évolution phylogénie et infections
2 AMU ODONTO - Aix-Marseille Université - Faculté d'odontologie

Trichomonas tenax, an anaerobic protist difficult to cultivate with an unreliable molecular identification, has been suspected of involvement in periodontitis, a multifactorial inflamma-tory dental disease affecting the soft tissue and bone of periodontium. A cohort of 106 peri-odontitis patients classified by stages of severity and 85 healthy adult control patients was constituted. An efficient culture protocol, a new identification tool by real-time qPCR of T. tenax and a Multi-Locus Sequence Typing system (MLST) based on T. tenax NIH4 reference strain were created. Fifty-three strains of Trichomonas sp. were obtained from peri-odontal samples. 37/106 (34.90%) T. tenax from patients with periodontitis and 16/85 (18.80%˚) T. tenax from control patients were detected by culture (p = 0.018). Sixty of the 191 samples were tested positive for T. tenax by qPCR, 24/85 (28%) controls and 36/106 (34%) periodontitis patients (p = 0.089). By combining both results, 45/106 (42.5%) patients were positive by culture and/or PCR, as compared to 24/85 (28.2%) controls (p = 0.042). A link was established between the carriage in patients of Trichomonas tenax and the severity of the disease. Genotyping demonstrates the presence of strain diversity with three major different clusters and a relation between disease strains and the periodontitis severity (p<0.05). More frequently detected in periodontal cases, T. tenax is likely to be related to the onset or/and evolution of periodontal diseases.

Mots clés: Periodontitis; Trichomonas; Polymerase chain reaction; Trichomonas vaginalis; Phylogenetic analysis; Sequence databases; Protists; Sequence alignment

Domaines: Bactériologie; Virologie; Parasitologie; Cardiologie et système cardiovasculaire; Maladies émergentes; Maladies infectieuses

Sarah Benabdelkader, Julien Andreani, Alexis Gillet, Elodie Terrer, Marion Pignoly, et al.. Specific clones of Trichomonas tenax are associated with periodontitis. PLoS ONE, 2019, 14 (3), pp.e0213338. ⟨10.1371/journal.pone.0213338⟩. ⟨hal-02262584⟩