Frontiers in Microbiology

Vibrio vulnificus can cause severe necrotic lesions within a short time. Recently, it has been reported that the numbers of wound infection cases in healthy hosts are increasing, for which surgical procedures are essential in many instances to eliminate the pathogen owing to its rapid proliferation. However, the mechanisms by which V. vulnificus can achieve wound infection in healthy hosts have not been elucidated. Here, we advance a systematic understanding of V. vulnificus wound infection through genome-wide identification of the relevant genes...

Poly-γ-glutamic acid (γ-PGA) is an anionic polymer with various applications. Teichoic acid (TA) is a special component of cell wall in gram-positive bacteria, and its D-alanylation modification can change the net negative charge of cell surface, autolysin activity and cationic binding efficiency, and might further affect metabolic production. In this research, four genes ( dltA, dltB, dltC , and dltD ) of dlt operon were, respectively, deleted and overexpressed in the γ-PGA producing strain Bacillus licheniformis WX-02...

Clostridioides difficile is a Gram positive, sporulated, rod-shape, anaerobic pathogen responsible for nosocomial diarrhea and colitis, mainly in antibiotic treated patients. C. difficile produce two toxins responsible for disease, toxin A (TcdA) and toxin B (TcdB), although not all strains produce them. Non-toxigenic C. difficile (NTCD) strains are able to colonize the intestinal mucosa and are often isolated from asymptomatic individuals. NTCD are poorly studied, their evolutionary history has not been elucidated, and their relationship with illness remains controversial...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Human Immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1) is known to induce the expression of SOCS3 which is a negative feed-back regulator of inflammatory responses. Here, we demonstrate that reactivation of latent HIV-1 leads to degradation of SOCS3 at early time points. Interestingly, SOCS3 degradation following transfection of HIV-1 RNA as well as polyIC in THP-1 cells further confirmed the role of viral RNA signaling in SOCS3 biology. Degradation of SOCS3 contributes toward viral RNA induced inflammatory responses. NF-κB signaling is also induced upon HIV-1 infection which leads to the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines to control the viral spread...

The biological control process mediated by microbes relies on multiple interactions among plants, pathogens and biocontrol agents (BCAs). One such efficient BCA is Bacillus cereus AR156, a bacterial strain that controls a broad spectrum of plant diseases and potentially works as a microbe elicitor of plant immune reactions. It remains unclear, however, whether the interaction between plants and B. cereus AR156 may facilitate composition changes of plant root exudates and whether these changes directly affect the growth of both plant pathogens and B...

Thirty-three Kluyveromyces marxianus strains were tested for the ability to form biofilm and mat structures in YPD and whey and for cell surface hydrophobicity. To identify genes potentially involved in adhesion properties, a RT-qPCR analysis was performed. Eight strains were able to adhere on polystyrene plates in both media and formed a mature mat structure. These strains showed a different level of hydrophobicity ranging from 55 to 66% in YPD and from 69 to 81% in whey. Four K. marxianus orthologs genes ( FLO11 , STE12 , TPK3 , and WSC4 ), known from studies in other yeast to be involved in biofilm formation, have been studied...

Neisseria gonorrhoeae and Neisseria meningitidis release peptidoglycan (PG) fragments from the cell as the bacteria grow. For N. gonorrhoeae these PG fragments are known to cause damage to human Fallopian tube tissue in organ culture that mimics the damage seen in patients with pelvic inflammatory disease. N. meningitidis also releases pro-inflammatory PG fragments, but in smaller amounts than those from N. gonorrhoeae . It is not yet known if PG fragment release contributes to the highly inflammatory conditions of meningitis and meningococcemia caused by N...

The biochemical properties of a new tungsten-containing aldehyde oxidoreductase from the mesophilic betaproteobacterium Aromatoleum aromaticum EbN1 (AOR Aa ) are presented in this study. The enzyme was purified from phenylalanine-grown cells of an overexpressing mutant lacking the gene for an aldehyde dehydrogenase normally involved in anaerobic phenylalanine degradation. AOR Aa catalyzes the oxidation of a broad variety of aldehydes to the respective acids with either viologen dyes or NAD+ as electron acceptors...

Chlamydia is a major bacterial pathogen that infects humans, as well as a wide range of animals, including marsupials, birds, cats, pigs, cattle, and sheep. Antibiotics are the only treatment currently available, however, with high rates of re-infection, there is mounting pressure to develop Chlamydia vaccines. In this review, we analyzed how Chlamydia vaccine trials have developed over the past 70 years and identified where future trials need to be focused. There has been a strong bias toward studies targeting C...

Schistosomiasis japonica is a significant health problem that leads to morbidity and mortality of humans. It is characterized by hepatic granulomatous response and fibrosis caused by eggs deposition in the liver. β-actin, a traditional housekeeping gene, is widely used as an internal control to normalize gene and protein expression. However, β-actin expression can fluctuate upon the treatment with pharmacological agents or under some physiological and pathological conditions. In this study, we found that the expressions of both β-actin mRNA and protein increased significantly with hepatic fibrosis formation after 6 weeks infection with Schistosoma japonicum and kept high level during the progression of hepatic fibrosis, while the levels of β-Tubulin and glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) remained stable...

This research examined the general soil fungi and AM fungal communities associated with a Lonely Tree species ( Vachellia pachyceras ) existing in the Sabah Al-Ahmad Natural Reserve located at the Kuwait desert. The goals of the study were to describe the general fungal and AM fungal communities present in the rhizospheric, non-rhizospheric soils and roots of V. pachyceras , respectively, as well as local and non-local V. pachyceras seedlings when grown under standard nursery growing environments. Soil and root samples were analyzed for an array of characteristics including soil physicochemical composition, and culture-independent method termed PCR-cloning, intermediate variable region of rDNA, the large subunit (LSU) and internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region sequence identifications...

The Enterobacter cloacae complex (ECC) includes common nosocomial pathogens capable of producing a wide variety of infections. Broad-spectrum antibiotic resistance, including the recent emergence of resistance to last-resort carbapenems, has led to increased interest in this group of organisms and carbapenem-resistant E. cloacae complex (CREC) in particular. Molecular typing methods based on heat-shock protein sequence, pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, comparative genomic hybridization, and, most recently, multilocus sequence typing have led to the identification of over 1069 ECC sequence types in 18 phylogenetic clusters across the globe...

Objectives: Understanding how phenotypic traits vary has been a longstanding goal of evolutionary biologists. When examining antibiotic-resistance in bacteria, it is generally understood that the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) has minimal variation specific to each bacterial strain-antibiotic combination. However, there is a less studied resistance trait, the mutant prevention concentration (MPC), which measures the MIC of the most resistant sub-population. Whether and how MPC varies has been poorly understood...

A comprehensive molecular epidemiological study using next-generation sequencing technology was conducted on 333 rotavirus A (RVA)-positive specimens collected from six sentinel hospitals across Japan over three consecutive seasons (2012-2014). The majority of the RVA isolates were grouped into five genotype constellations: Wa-like G1P[8], DS-1-like G1P[8], G2P[4], G3P[8] and G9P[8]. Phylogenetic analysis showed that the distribution of strains varied by geographical locations and epidemic seasons. The VP7 genes of different G types were estimated to evolve at 7...

Published PCR primers targeting the ammonia monooxygenase gene ( amoA ) were applied to samples from activated sludge systems operated with low dissolved oxygen (DO) to quantify total and clade-level Nitrospira that perform complete ammonium oxidation (comammox); however, we found these existing primers resulted in significant artifact-associated non-target amplification. This not only overestimated comammox amoA copies but also resulted in numerous false positive detections in the environmental samples tested, as confirmed by gel electrophoresis...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fmicb.2018.01466.].

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fmicb.2018.02394.].

Lactococcus lactis is one of the most important micro-organisms in the dairy industry for the fermentation of cheese and buttermilk. Besides the conversion of lactose to lactate it is responsible for product properties such as flavor and texture, which are determined by volatile metabolites, proteolytic activity and exopolysaccharide production. While the species Lactococcus lactis consists of the two subspecies lactis and cremoris their taxonomic position is confused by a group of strains that, despite of a cremoris genotype, display a lactis phenotype...

Candida species, such as Candida albicans and Candida glabrata , cause infections at different host sites because they adapt their metabolism depending on the available nutrients. They are able to proliferate under both nutrient-rich and nutrient-poor conditions. This adaptation is what makes these fungi successful pathogens. For both species, sugars are very important nutrients and as the sugar level differs depending on the host niche, different sugar sensing systems must be present. Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been used as a model for the identification of these sugar sensing systems...