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. 2017 Dec 1;7:16719. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-16749-9

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© The Author(s) 2017

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Application of the dermocorticosteroid clobetasol to the skin of chronically infected mice increased the Borrelia spirochete abundance in the mouse skin. Mice were infected with Borrelia burgdorferi ss strain N40 via (A) intradermal or (B) intraperitoneal inoculation. At 40 days post-infection, the mice were treated with clobetasol for two days. At different time points following the clobetasol treatment (5 h, 24 h, 3d, 5d, 7d), the mice were sacrificed and the mouse skin where the dermocorticosteroid had been applied was excised. The Borrelia load in the mouse skin was estimated using qPCR for seven days. Different mouse organs were tested by culture for seven days to determine the presence of Borrelia. Tissue biopsies that yield spirochete-negative cultures were retested using qPCR. The blood remained spirochete-negative over the duration of the tick blood meal, with the exception of two mice in the intraperitoneal group. The asterisk (*) indicates time points where the spirochete load is significantly higher (p < 0.05) than the base line (t = 0).