Helicobacter pylori colonizes the human stomach and confers an increased risk for the development of peptic ulceration, noncardia gastric adenocarcinoma, and gastric lymphoma. A secreted H. pylori toxin, VacA, can cause multiple alterations in gastric epithelial cells, including cell death. In this study, we sought to identify host cell factors that are required for VacA-induced cell death. To ...

Aeromonas hydrophila secretes several extracellular proteins including enterotoxin, hemolysin and aerolysin that are associated with the bacterial virulence. Previous studies have shown that two hemolytic toxins, hemolysin A and aerolysin A contribute to the virulence of Aeromonas hydrophila. In the current study, a total of 50 strains of Aeromonas hydrophila, including 28 (56%) strains isolate...

Helicobacter pylori infection is common in Alaska. The development of severe H. pylori disease is partially determined by the virulence of the infecting strain. Here we present vacA and cagA genotype data for H. pylori strains isolated from Alaskans and their correlation with clinical disease. We enrolled patients scheduled for esophagogastroduodenoscopy and positive for H. pylori infection. Ga...

In order to investigate and compare the presence of Helicobacter pylori VacA in primary liver cancer specimens (12 hepatocellular carcinoma and 6 cholangiocarcinoma) and control liver specimens (7 non-primary liver cancer) from Thai patients who underwent liver resection, H. pylori VacA gene was assayed in extracted DNA by real-time polymerase chain reaction. The selected amplicons revealed hig...

Helicobacter pylori secretes a toxin, VacA, that can form anion-selective membrane channels. Within a unique amino-terminal hydrophobic region of VacA, there are three tandem GXXXG motifs (defined by glycines at positions 14, 18, 22, and 26), which are characteristic of transmembrane dimerization sequences. The goals of the current study were to investigate whether these GXXXG motifs are requir...

Gastric Helicobacter pylori infection may lead to multifocal atrophic corpus gastritis associated with loss of epithelial cells as well as glandular structures. The current work investigated H. pylori effects on cell death of isolated, nontransformed rat parietal cells (PC). Highly enriched rat PC (>97%) were isolated from gastric mucosa and cultured in serum-free medium over 24 h. The cells we...

The genotypes of 78 strains of Helicobacter pylori from Calcutta, India (55 from ulcer patients and 23 from more-benign infections), were studied, with a focus on putative virulence genes and neutral DNA markers that were likely to be phylogenetically informative. PCR tests indicated that 80 to 90% of Calcutta strains carried the cag pathogenicity island (PAI) and potentially toxigenic vacAs1 a...

background: gastric cancer (gc) is the fifth common malignant disease and the third leading cause of cancer-related mortality in the world. ardabil, a northwestern province of iran, includes the highest rate of gc within the country. helicobacter pylori (h. pylori) vaca gene plays a major role in generating and maintaining the gastric inflammatory response , which alters the enteric nervous sys...

The predominant Helicobacter pylori strains circulating among geographic locations differ in regard to genomic structure. The association of the cagA-positive, vacA s1 genotypes with peptic ulcer disease (PUD) and gastric cancer was reported in Western countries but not in East Asian countries. Strains from Western countries predominantly possessed cagA type 2a, vacA s1a or s1b/m1a, or vacA m2a...