Ricin toxin, an extremely potent and heat-stable toxin produced from the bean of the ubiquitous Ricinus communis (castor bean plant), has been categorized by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a category B biothreat agent that is moderately easy to disseminate. Ricin has the potential to be used as an agent of biological warfare and bioterrorism. Therefore, there is a cr...

oil in water emulsions have attracted considerable attention in food industry due to their large applications. in this study, the effect of thermal treatment on oil in water emulsions (o/w) containing 40% oil was studied. the emulsions were prepared using xanthan gum, guar gum and carboxymethyl cellulose as stabilizer and polyoxyethylen sorbitan monooleat as emulsifier. a mixture design was use...

The prevalence of Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) in 433 stool samples from diarrhoeal cases of all ages was studied using two commercially available test kits for the detection of heat labile toxin (LT) and the infant mouse assay for the heat stable toxin (ST). 16 samples (3.7%) were positive for ETEC, of which nine were producing ST alone, six LT alone and only one was producing both ...

Heat-stable enterotoxin b (STb) is a low molecular weight toxin known to bind sulfatide, its receptor. The fate of STb bound to rat intestinal epithelium cells was followed using an anti-toxin gold labeled assay and transmission electron microscopy. The data suggest that STb toxin and the fusion protein maltose binding protein (MBP)-STb were internalized whereas its mutant I41 E-M42R with reduc...

Clostridium perfringens type E iota toxin, a dermonecrotic and lethal binary toxin, was purified to homogeneity. Each protein component of the toxin, iota a (ia) or iota b (ib), appeared as a single band by gradient or sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and yielded a single immunoprecipitin arc by crossed immunoelectrophoresis with homologous antiserum. Individually, ia (...

Two of 49 cytolethal distending toxin-producing strains of Escherichia coli isolated from human stools contained the gene coding for heat-stable enterotoxin b (STb), as detected by a colony hybridization assay. The STb gene was found to be on a 70-kb plasmid also coding for heat-labile enterotoxin (pLT-I). Restriction endonuclease analysis showed the STb gene from human isolates to be similar t...

Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) is a water and food-borne pathogen that infects the small intestine of the human gut and causes diarrhoea. Enterotoxigenic E. coli adheres to the epithelium by means of colonization factors and secretes two enterotoxins, the heat labile toxin and/or the heat stable toxin that both deregulate ion channels and cause secretory diarrhoea. Enterotoxigenic E. c...

Many emerging and reemerging bacterial pathogens synthesize toxins that serve as primary virulence factors. We highlight seven bacterial toxins produced by well-established or newly emergent pathogenic microbes. These toxins, which affect eukaryotic cells by a variety of means, include Staphylococcus aureus alpha-toxin, Shiga toxin, cytotoxic necrotizing factor type 1, Escherichia coli heat-sta...

The heat-labile toxin (LT) is one of the major virulence factors of enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC). We recently described that 20 polymorphic LT variants are present in ETEC strains isolated globally. Two of the variants, LT1 and LT2, are particularly common and we found that they were associated with clonal ETEC lineages that express the colonization factors (CFs), CFA/I, CS1+CS3, CS2...