The fundamental principles of genetic manipulation are explained, as are the methods of production of vaccines of veterinary importance. Specific attenuation of micro-organisms may result from genetically-engineered mutations which produce metabolic blocks, from the development of effective bacterial toxoids and from viral gene segment reassortment. Recombinant DNA techniques have been used to ...

Mass implementation of DNA vaccines is hindered by the requirement of high plasmid dosages and poor immunogenicity. We evaluated the capacity of Mannheimia haemolytica ghosts as delivery system for DNA vaccines. In vitro studies showed that bacterial ghosts loaded with a plasmid carrying the green fluorescent protein-encoding gene (pEGFP-N1) are efficiently taken up by APC, thereby leading to h...

Meningitis is among the 10 commonest infectious causes of death worldwide. This retrospective analysis of reported cases of meningitis in Bahrain aimed to assess the trend in the incidence of bacterial meningitis from 1990 to 2013, before and after the introduction of new vaccines. Of 1455 reported cases of meningitis during the study period 73.1% were viral and 26.9% were bacterial etiology (t...

Worldwide, enteric infections are the second commonest cause of disease burden due to all infectious diseases. It is estimated that they are responsible for 1.3 million deaths per year, mostly in children below 5 years of age in the developing world. Enteric infections are caused by a gamut of bacterial, viral and parasitic agents. These include viruses (rotaviruses, enteric adenoviruses, astro...

Bacterial infectious diseases remain the single most important threat to health worldwide. Although conventional vaccinology approaches were successful in conferring protection against several diseases, they failed to provide efficacious solutions against many others. The advent of whole-genome sequencing changed the way to think about vaccine development, enabling the targeting of possible vac...

Discovering virulence factors of pathogenic bacteria is a key in understanding pathogenesis and for identification of targets for novel drugs and design of new vaccines. Comparative genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics have become the popular tools in discovering the virulence factors in bacterial pathogens, such as Neisseria meningitidis, Yersinia pestis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and S...

Investigations were done to determine whether vaccines prepared with chemically killed Staphylococcus haemolyticus RU1 and Streptococcus bovis AV46 (bacteria that have been demonstrated to express human choriogonadotropin [hCG]-like material on their surface) elicited antibodies in rabbits with specificity for hCG determinants. In addition, the anatomical locus of the hCG-like factor was determ...

The ability of plants to serve as a production system for bacterial lipoprotein vaccines has been investigated. First, the effect of high-level expression of the Borrelia burgdorferi outer membrane protein A (OspA), a prototype vaccine against Lyme disease, has been examined by a proteomics approach. Analysis by 2D-PAGE of wild type tobacco plants and transplastomic plants accumulating recombin...

whooping cough and diphtheria are vaccine preventable diseases. diphtheria, due to corynebacterium diphtheriae or corynebactium ulcerans, two gram positive bacteria, is a serious upper respiratory tract disease with high morbidity and mortality rates. vaccination, via an acellular vaccine composed only of purified, detoxified diphtheria toxin, has significantly reduced the incidence of the dise...