The Whipple Bacillus

Invisible to the naked eye, Tropheryma whipplei is a tiny microbe that lives in the human body. It can cause Whipple’s disease, which is rare but nearly always fatal unless treated with antibiotics. With symptoms that include abdominal pain, diarrhea, and fever, Whipple’s disease seems to mimic more common diseases.

The bacillus was named after the American pathologist George Hoyt Whipple, who described the disease for the first time in 1907. Almost a century later, researchers have now sequenced the genome of the T. whipplei bacterium.

The three fluorescence in-situ hybridization images below feature tissue samples from patients with Whipple’s disease.