The multifunctional role of lipids as structural components of membranes, signaling molecules, and metabolic substrates makes them an ideal partner for pathogens to hijack host cell processes for their own survival. The properties and composition of unique membrane micro-domains such as membrane rafts make these regions a natural target for pathogens as it affords them an opportunity to hijack ...

Microbial pathogens have evolved strategies to live and multiply within their hosts, who in turn have evolved surveillance systems that detect such pathogens and trigger countermeasures. This Microbiology Select highlights recent papers that reveal new aspects of these host and microbial strategies. The bacterial pathogen that causes typhoid fever in humans, Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi (S...

Molecular typing analysis showed that both case-patients had a monoclonal infection caused by C. diffi cile ribotype 027. Both isolates had tcdA, tcdB, and cdtB and had a deletion in tcdC (data not shown). In summary, the described severe cases of C. diffi cile infection in Chile were caused by epidemic C. diffi cile ribotype 027. One of these casepatients required urgent colectomy. These resul...

Volume 1, no. 4, e00512-13, 2013. After publication, we detected the presence of a putative cytolethal distending toxin (CDT) gene cluster in Helicobacter fennelliae MRY12-0050. In the last paragraph before the accession numbers, the third sentence should read as follows: “H. cinaedi and H. hepaticus have been reported to express cytolethal distending toxin (CDT), which causes DNA damage to tar...

Helicobacter hepaticus, which induces chronic hepatitis and typhlocolitis in susceptible mouse strains, produces a cytolethal distending toxin (CDT) consisting of CdtA, CdtB, and CdtC. A cdtB-deficient H. hepaticus isogenic mutant (HhcdtBm7) was generated and characterized for colonization parameters in four intestinal regions (jejunum, ileum, cecum, and colon) of outbred Swiss Webster (SW) mic...

This paper explores several aspects together for a fine-grained Chinese discourse analysis. We deal with the issues of ambiguous discourse markers, ambiguous marker linkings, and more than one discourse marker. A universal feature representation is proposed. The pair-once postulation, cross-discourse-unit-first rule and word-pair-marker-first rule select a set of discourse markers from ambiguou...

Some strains of Clostridium perfringens, Clostridium spiroforme and Clostridium difficile produce binary toxins known respectively as iota toxin, S toxin and CDT. Each toxin consists of two unlinked polypeptides (e.g. CDTa and CDTb) that only together have biological activity. Taking an historical perspective, we review the development and early use of assays employing the specific neutralizati...