Treponema pallidum DNA amplification may be a useful technique to aid in the diagnosis of syphilis and increase case infection. While specific genes have been used in PCR techniques for this purpose, the tp0574 gene has been used as a main target due to its specificity; the best single or combination of gene targets is unknown. Given the tp0548 gene is employed for genotyping, only a few studies have evaluated its utility for T. pallidum detection. Here, we have evaluated two gene targets (tp0574 and tp0548) for T. pallidum DNA detection in extragenital and lesion samples from persons with syphilis. We found that the implementation of tp0548 as a second target improves T. pallidum DNA detection and that tp0548 alone performs better than tp0574 in both oral and lesion samples. However, further research is necessary to explore the implementation of tp0548 target to improve the detection in diverse types of samples.
Vásquez et al. (Thu,) studied this question.