hepatitis b surface antigen is the first genetically engineered vaccine licensed for human use. various strategies have been proposed to obtain a vaccine that would bypass the need for injection. in this study, a non-toxic portion of heat-stable enterotoxin of escherichia coli that is capable of adhering to epithelial cells was inserted at amino acid position 112 of hepatitis surface antigen. t...

materials and methods two-hundred pasteurized (n = 100) and nonpasteurized (n = 100) cheese samples were collected. the initial isolation was performed on pemba specific medium. antibiotic susceptibility testing was performed using several antibiotic disks, according to the guidelines of the clinical laboratory and standards institute. specific primers amplifying the hbla enterotoxin-encoding g...

Intestinal guanylate cyclase mediates the action of the heat-stable enterotoxin to cause a decrease in intestinal fluid absorption and to increase chloride secretion, ultimately causing diarrhea. An endogenous ligand that acts on this guanylate cyclase has not previously been found. To search for a potential endogenous ligand, we utilized T84 cells, a human colon carcinoma-derived cell line, in...

Beta-toxin is one of the lethal toxins of Clostridium perfringens. It shares sequence homology with the pore-forming alpha-toxin of Staphylococcus aureus and structural homology has been indicated by mutagenesis studies. Human endothelial cells are sensitive to the toxic effect of alpha-toxin and in order to investigate the function of beta-toxin we have looked at the effect of the protein on h...

Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) produce heat-labile (LT) and/or heat-stable enterotoxins (ST). Despite that, the mechanism of action of both toxins are well known, there is great controversy in the literature concerning the in vitro production and release of LT and, for ST, no major concerns have been discussed. Furthermore, the majority of published papers describe the use of only one ...

A collection of 20 Escherichia coli strains that produce cytolethal distending toxin (CDT) were analyzed for their virulence-associated genes. All of these strains were serotyped, and multiplex PCR analysis was used to ascertain the presence of genes encoding other virulence factors, including Shiga toxin, intimin, enterohemolysin, cytotoxic necrotizing factor type 1 (CNF1) and CNF2, heat-stabl...

Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) is one of the main causes of childhood diarrhea in developing countries and in travelers. However, this pathogen has often not been reported in surveys of diarrheal pathogens, due to lack of simple standardized methods to detect ETEC in many laboratories. ETEC expresses one or both of two different enterotoxin subtypes: heat-stable toxins, a heat-labile t...

BACKGROUND & AIMS Substance P, a member of the tachykinin family, is a prosecretory neuropeptide distributed widely throughout the enteric nervous system. Implicated in inflammatory states, its role in enterotoxigenic water and electrolyte secretion is unclear. We assessed the effect of substance P antagonists and neurokinin receptor antagonists on cholera toxin-, Escherichia coli heat-labile e...