Affiliation:
1. Division of Geographic Medicine and Infectious Diseases, New England Medical Center and Tufts University School of Medicine,1 Boston, Massachusetts
2. Howard Hughes Medical Institute2 and
Abstract
ABSTRACT
The Shiga toxins (Stx) are critical virulence factors for
Escherichia coli
O157:H7 and other serotypes of enterohemorrhagic
E. coli
(EHEC). These potent toxins are encoded in the genomes of temperate lambdoid bacteriophages. We recently demonstrated that induction of the resident Stx2-encoding prophage in an O157:H7 clinical isolate is required for toxin production by this strain. Since several factors produced by human cells, including hydrogen peroxide (H
2
O
2
), are capable of inducing lambdoid prophages, we hypothesized that such molecules might also induce toxin production by EHEC. Here, we studied whether H
2
O
2
and also human neutrophils, an important endogenous source of H
2
O
2
, induced Stx2 expression by an EHEC clinical isolate. Both H
2
O
2
and neutrophils were found to augment Stx2 production, raising the possibility that these agents may lead to prophage induction in vivo and thereby contribute to EHEC pathogenesis.
Publisher
American Society for Microbiology
Subject
Infectious Diseases,Immunology,Microbiology,Parasitology
Cited by
120 articles.
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