Bordetella pertussis is a human pathogen that can infect the respiratory tract and cause the disease known as whooping cough. B. pertussis uses pertussis toxin (PT) and adenylate cyclase toxin (ACT) to kill and modulate host cells to allow the pathogen to survive and persist. B. pertussis encodes many uncharacterized transcription factors, and very little is known about their functions. RpoE is...

Evidence suggests that the resurgence of pertussis in many industrialized countries may result from the failure of current vaccines to prevent nasopharyngeal colonization by Bordetella pertussis, the principal causative agent of whooping cough. Here, we used a baboon model to test the protective potential of the novel, live attenuated pertussis vaccine candidate BPZE1. A single intranasal/intra...

Whooping cough is an acute respiratory disease caused by the small, gram-negative bacterium Bordetella pertussis. B. pertussis expresses several factors that contribute to its ability to cause disease. These factors include surface-associated molecules, which are involved in the adherence of the organism to respiratory epithelial cells, as well as several extracellular toxins that inhibit host ...

BACKGROUND Bordetella pertussis, as a causative agent of whooping cough, due to the annual rise y of infection cases, failure of prophylaxis and treatment by macrolides, is considered as the new concern in the health care system. OBJECTIVES The main objective of this study was the determination of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) at domain V, as the main binding site for macrolides, fol...

Bordetella pertussis produces a calmodulin-dependent adenylate cyclase (AC) which acts as a toxin capable of penetrating eukaryotic cells and generating high levels of intracellular cyclic AMP. Transfer of target cells into B. pertussis AC-free medium leads to a rapid decay in the intracellular AC activity, implying that the invasive enzyme is unstable in the host cytoplasm. We report here that...

A novel multitarget real-time PCR (RT-PCR) assay for the rapid identification of Bordetella pertussis, B. parapertussis, and B. holmesii was developed using multicopy insertion sequences (ISs) in combination with the pertussis toxin subunit S1 (ptxS1) singleplex assay. The RT-PCR targets for the multiplex assay include IS481, commonly found in B. pertussis and B. holmesii; IS1001 of B. parapert...

Bordetella parapertussis and Bordetella pertussis are closely related species that cause whooping cough, an acute, immunizing disease. Their coexistence in the same host populations at the same time and vaccine studies showing that B. pertussis vaccines have little effect on B. parapertussis infection or disease suggest that the protective immunity induced by each does not efficiently cross pro...

It has been demonstrated that under iron-restricted conditions Bordetella pertussis can take up iron from human transferrin within 30 min of exposure. B. pertussis utilizes two mechanisms for acquiring iron from human transferrin, a direct contact method and a siderophore mediated system. Both systems are shown to result in bacterial internalization of iron from transferrin. However, direct con...

Signaling through Toll-like receptors (TLR) activates dendritic cell (DC) maturation and IL-12 production, which directs the induction of Th1 cells. We found that the production of IL-10, in addition to inflammatory cytokines and chemokines, was significantly reduced in DCs from TLR4-defective C3H/HeJ mice in response to Bordetella pertussis. TLR4 was also required for B. pertussis LPS-induced ...