As the study of microbes moves into the era of functional genomics, there is an increasing need for molecular tools for analysis of a wide diversity of microorganisms. Currently, biological study of many prokaryotes of agricultural, medical, and fundamental scientific interest is limited by the lack of adequate genetic tools. We report the application of the bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC...

Due to abundant contamination in various foods, the pathogenesis of Bacillus cereus has been widely studied in physiological and molecular level. B. cereus FORC_005 was isolated from a Korean side dish, soy sauce braised fish-cake with quail-egg in South Korea. While 21 complete genome sequences of B. cereus has been announced to date, this strain was completely sequenced, analyzed, and compare...

Bacillus cereus can contaminate food and cause emetic and diarrheal foodborne illness. Here, we report whole-genome sequences of eight strains of B. cereus, isolated from different food sources.

BACKGROUND Previous reports of site-directed deletion analysis on gamma (gamma)-phage lysin protein (PlyG) have demonstrated that removal of a short amino acid sequence in the C-terminal region encompassing a 10-amino acid motif (190LKMTADFILQ199) abrogates its binding activity specific to the cell wall of Bacillus anthracis. Whether short synthetic peptides representing the10-amino acid PlyG p...

Emerging B. cereus strains that cause anthrax-like disease have been isolated in Cameroon (CA strain) and Côte d'Ivoire (CI strain). These strains are unusual, because their genomic characterisation shows that they belong to the B. cereus species, although they harbour two plasmids, pBCXO1 and pBCXO2, that are highly similar to the pXO1 and pXO2 plasmids of B. anthracis that encode the toxins a...

A food poisoning outbreak affected 114 female Malay students staying in a religious secondary school hostel in Klang. The students developed an illness mainly characterized by abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting and giddiness. The median incubation period in this outbreak was 2.5 hours. Laboratory examination of suspected food revealed 2.3 X106 Bacillus cereus organisms per gram of fried noodles. ...

Central nervous system infections caused by Bacillus cereus have rarely been reported in infants. In this paper, the case of a 2-month-old low-birth-weight female who developed meningitis 45 days after resolution of a bloodstream infection (BSI) is described. The pulsed-field gel electrophoresis results revealed that the patterns of both B. cereus isolates responsible for the acute meningitis a...

Spores of Bacillus megaterium QM B1551 are encased in a morphologically distinctive exosporium. We demonstrate here that genes encoded on the indigenous pBM500 and pBM600 plasmids are required for exosporium assembly and or stability in spores of this strain. Bioinformatic analyses identified genes encoding orthologues of the B. cereus-family exosporium nap and basal layer proteins within the B...

All 47 food-borne isolates of Bacillus cereus sensu stricto, as well as 10 of 12 food-borne, enterotoxigenic isolates of Bacillus thuringiensis, possessed appendages. Spores were moderately to highly hydrophobic, and each had a net negative charge. These characteristics indicate that spores of food-associated B. thuringiensis and not only B. cereus sensu stricto have high potential to adhere to...

Bacillus cereus behaves as an opportunistic pathogen frequently causing gastrointestinal diseases, and it is increasingly recognized to be responsible for severe local or systemic infections. Pathogenicity of B. cereus mainly relies on the secretion of a wide array of toxins and enzymes and also on the ability to undergo swarming differentiation in response to surface-sensing. In this report, t...