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Mckee Palm posted an update 1 week ago
Campylobacterjejuni causes acute diarrhea as a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in children especially in the developing countries of Asia and Africa. C.jejuni has been identified as a member of the priority pathogens category due to the sudden emergence of multidrug-resistant isolates. Therefore, it is important to develop a protective vaccine against this pathogen. In the present study, the Reverse vaccinology approach was used to identify vaccine targets from the proteome of diarrheagenic C. jejuni strain NCTC11168 for the development of chimeric vaccine candidates against C. jejuni. Pathogen proteins that have adhesin like properties and role in virulence but not present in the human host were selected for the design of a multi-epitope vaccine. MHC class I & II and B-cell epitopes present in the selected vaccine target proteins were screened using different immunoinformatics tools. The commonly predicted epitopes from their corresponding different servers were selected and further shortlisted based on their immunogenicity, antigenicity, and toxicity analysis. Shortlisted peptides were joined by GPGPG linkers to design a multi-epitope vaccine construct. Immune-modulating adjuvant monophosphoryl lipid sequence was added with the vaccine construct’s N terminal using EAAAK linkers to enhance the immunogenicity. The designed vaccine construct was evaluated by antigenicity, allergenicity, solubility, and physicochemical analysis using various bioinformatics tools. A three-dimensional model of vaccine construct was modeled by the Phyre2 server and refinement by the GalaxyRefine tool. Constructed model quality was validated by the ProSA-web error-detection tool and the Ramachandran plot. After that vaccine model was docked with TLR-4 protein and complex stability confirmed by molecular dynamics simulation studies. Finally, In-silico cloning of vaccine constructs into a vector was performed to ensuring its effective expression in the microbial system.Most environmental parameters have no consistent effect on the expression of bacterial genes responsible for their virulence. However, as fish are poikilothermic, the possibility of temperature variation having a pronounced effect on the expression of virulence-associated gene(s) of bacteria infecting the host needs to be investigated. In this study, the diversity of virulence genes in seven Aeromonas hydrophila isolates collected from diseased fish from different parts of India was characterized, and the effect of temperature variation on the extent of expression of their virulence was investigated. Baf-A1 mouse All bacterial isolates were screened for a total of nine bacterial virulent genes aerolysin, hemolysin, cytoen, outer membrane protein TS (Omp TS), elastase, flagellin, lipase, β hemolysin and type 3 secretion system, and the diversity in their presence or absence were marked at a particular in vitro condition. Three bacterial isolates (nos. 1, 7 and 2) were selected for further study, based on their ability to cause varied mortalities (20-100%) in Labeo rohita juveniles in intraperitoneal challenge study. Further, three isolates were injected intraperitoneally into L. rohita fingerlings at three different temperatures (i.e., 20, 28 and 37 °C) and at 6 h post-challenge, the kidney samples were collected to measure the levels of all nine bacterial virulence genes using semi-quantitative PCR. The maximum level of amplicons of virulence genes in all three A. hydrophila isolates was noticed at 28 °C as compared to 37 °C and 20 °C. It was also observed that haemolysin played a more prominent role in the expression of virulence, when compared to cytoen gene. Hence, it was concluded that water temperature does play a crucial role in governing virulence gene expression, and a temperature of 28 °C would be considered as suitable for looking into the pathogenicity of A. hydrophila for conducting any challenge study with this organism in tropical environment.Biofilm formation and virulence factor secretion in opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa are essential for establishment of chronic and recurrent infection, which are regulated by quorum sensing (QS) system. In this study, a set of cajaninstilbene acid analogues were designed and synthesized, and their abilities to inhibit QS and biofilm formation were investigated. Among all the compounds, compounds 3g, 3m and 3o showed potent anti-biofilm activity, especially 3o exhibited promising biofilm inhibitory activity with biofilm inhibition ratio of 49.50 ± 1.35% at 50 μM. Three lacZ reporter strains were constructed to identify the effects of compound 3o on different QS systems. Compound 3o showed the suppression on the expression of lasB-lacZ and pqsA-lacZ as well as on the production of their corresponding virulence factors. Therefore, compound 3o is expected to be generated as a lead compound with inhibition of biofilm formation and QS of Pseudomonas aeruginosa.Senecavirus A (SVA)-associated vesicular disease (SAVD) has extensively been present in the swine industry during the past years. The mechanisms of SVA-host interactions at the molecular level, subsequent to SVA infection, are unclear. We studied the gene expression profiles of LLC-PK1 cells, with or without SVA infection, for 6 h and 12 h using an RNA-seq technology. Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway enrichment analysis were performed on differentially expressed genes (DEGs). Immune-related genes and pathways were significantly modified after SVA infection. To confirm the RNA-seq data, 28 important DEGs were selected for RT-qPCR assays. All DEGs exhibited expression patterns consistent with the RNA-seq results. Among them, type I IFNs (including IFN-α and IFN-β) showed the largest upregulation, followed by RSAD2, DDX58, MX1 and the 17 other DEGs. In contrary, ID2 and another 5 DEGs were down-regulated or unchanged. These results indicated that type I IFNs play a critical role in host immune responses against SVA infection at early stage, while other immune-regulated genes directly or indirectly participate in the host immune responses.