Crohn's disease has long been suspected of having a mycobacterial cause. Mycobacterium paratuberculosis is a known cause of chronic enteritis in animals, including primates, but may be very difficult to detect by culture. IS900 is a multicopy genomic DNA insertion element highly specific forM paratuberculosis. A polymerase chain reaction (PCR) based on the 5' region of IS900 and capable of the ...

The etiology of Crohn's disease in humans is largely unknown. Clinical signs of Crohn's disease partly resemble the clinical picture of Johne's disease in ruminants caused by Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis. Because of the high prevalence of these bacteria in (products of) ruminants and their remarkable thermostability, concern has been raised about the possible role of these bacter...

The aim of this study was to examine the specificity of primers designed to detect the insertion element IS901 commonly used in differentiation of Mycobacterium avium complex strains. This study shows that one of these primers non-specifically anneals to a sequence inside insertion element IS900, specific IS of M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis and to another sequence flanking this element. The ...

It has been shown that Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (M. paratuberculosis) activates the Mitogen Activated Protein Kinase (MAPK) p38 pathway, yet it is unclear which components of M. paratuberculosis are involved in the process. Therefore, a set of 42 M. paratuberculosis recombinant proteins expressed from coding sequences annotated as lipoproteins were screened for their abil...

Fecal culture has been the primary method used to diagnose paratuberculosis in goats. It is laborious, slow, and expensive. Validation of enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs) on milk samples could make paratuberculosis testing more widely available for goat farmers. The aim of this study was to determine the accuracy of serum and milk ELISAs for paratuberculosis, relative to fecal cultur...

Infection of ruminants with Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (M. paratuberculosis) leads to a chronic and often fatal granulomatous enteritis known as Johne's disease. Most infections with M. paratuberculosis occur during the first 6 months of life, and there is some evidence for transmission in utero. Once established, infections typically exist in a subclinical state for severa...

Low pH and salt are two factors contributing to the inactivation of bacterial pathogens during a 60-day curing period for cheese. The kinetics of inactivation for Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis strains ATCC 19698 and Dominic were measured at 20 degrees C under different pH and NaCl conditions commonly used in processing cheese. The corresponding D values (decimal reduction times; t...

Multilocus enzyme electrophoresis analysis was used to evaluate the Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC), M. paratuberculosis, and nine other mycobacterial species. The average number of alleles per locus was 2.8 for the 35 MAC and 2 M. paratuberculosis strains which represented 24 electrophoretic types (ETs) and two distinct groups. The M. avium group was resolved into 17 ETs and contained the M....

Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis is the causative agent of Johne's disease (JD) in cattle. M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis infects the gastrointestinal tract of calves, localizing and persisting primarily in the distal ileum. A high percentage of cattle exposed to M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis do not develop JD, but the mechanisms by which they resist infection are not understood...