Reiter treponene in syphilis serology.

Origin Attempts carried out about the year 1920 at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute of Experimental Therapy in Berlin to culture treponemes from eighty to ninety patients with primary syphilis, were successful in seven of these cases. One of the strains obtained, denoted as B 36, was said to have remained pathogenic for rabbits (Wassermann and Ficker, 1922). Reiter (1960), who continued the work of these authors, succeeded in isolating some additional strains. Investigating the nature of the treponemal antigens, Beck (1939) used the B 36 strain. Eagle and Germuth (1948) found this strain to be identical in its growth properties and serological specificity with a transplant of the same strain, obtained from Reiter in 1939. In Germany, the strain was lost during the war but regained from the U.S.A. in 1951 (Fuhner and Gaehtgens, 1954). Thus, all experiments with the Reiter treponeme since the second world war are likely to have been carried out with the B 36 strain. This fact is unquestionable with regard to the studies of antigenic structure by D'Alessandro and Dardanoni (1953), who obtained their strain from Eagle, and by De Bruijn (1956), who obtained his strain from Dardanoni. Pillot and Faure (1959) received their strain from Pautrizel, who only made reference to the work of Wassermann and Ficker (1922) (Pautrizel, Bonnardot, and Szersnovicz, 1957).