Essential genes from Arctic bacteria used to construct stable, temperature-sensitive bacterial vaccines.

ABSTRACT: All bacteria share a set of evolutionarily conserved essential genes that encode products that are required for viability. The great diversity of environments that bacteria inhabit, including environments at extreme temperatures, place adaptive pressure on essential genes. We sought to use this evolutionary diversity of essential genes to engineer bacterial pathogens to be stably temperature-sensitive, and thus useful as live vaccines. We isolated essential genes from bacteria found in the Arctic and substituted them for their counterparts into pathogens of mammals. We found that substitution of nine different essential genes from psychrophilic (cold-loving) bacteria into mammalian pathogenic bacteria resulted in strains that died below their normal-temperature growth limits. Substitution

SUBMITTER: Duplantis BN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2922166 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature