Salmonella enterica serotype Typhi (S. Typhi) is a causative organism of typhoid fever. A number of Salmonella serovars express a capsular polysaccharide antigen known as Vi, the biosynthetic and export proteins of which are encoded within the viaB locus of Salmonella Pathogenicity Island -7 (SPI-7). SPI-7 is inserted between two partially duplicated copies of tRNA -pheU gene. We have investiga...

Flagella are surface appendages that are important for bacterial motility and invasion of host cells. Two flagellin subunits in Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium, FliC and FljB, are alternatively expressed by a site-specific DNA inversion mechanism called flagellar phase variation. Although this inversion mechanism is understood at the molecular level, the key factor controlling the expre...

Motility is one of the most important traits for rhizosphere colonization by pseudomonads. Despite this importance, motility is severely repressed in the rhizosphere-colonizing strain Pseudomonas fluorescens F113. This bacterium is unable to swarm under laboratory conditions and produce relatively small swimming haloes. However, phenotypic variants with the ability to swarm and producing swimmi...

The ability of plant-associated micro-organisms to colonize and compete in the rhizosphere is specially relevant for the biotechnological application of micro-organisms as inoculants. Pseudomonads are one of the best root colonizers and they are widely used in plant-pathogen biocontrol and in soil bioremediation. This study analyses the motility mechanism of the well-known biocontrol strain Pse...

Colorectal cancers are significant causes of morbidity and mortality and existing therapies often perform poorly for individuals afflicted with advanced disease. Oncolytic virotherapy is an emerging therapeutic modality with great promise for addressing this medical need. Herein we describe the in vivo testing of recombinant variants of the tanapoxvirus (TPV). Recombinant viruses were made abla...

Surfactant protein A (SP-A) is an important lung innate immune protein that kills microbial pathogens by opsonization and membrane permeabilization. We investigated the basis of SP-A-mediated pulmonary clearance of Pseudomonas aeruginosa using genetically-engineered SP-A mice and a library of signature-tagged P. aeruginosa mutants. A mutant with an insertion into flgE, the gene that encodes fla...

introduction: influenza a virus causes unpredictable epidemics and pandemics by creating antigenic variations. with the appearance of each new strain, rapid emergency countermeasures are taken against this new strain. hence, designing an applicable and cross protective strategy to counter this virus is of great importance. to achieve this, choosing conserved antigenic regions in influenza virus...

In this work, we propose a novel and efficient method for articulated human pose estimation in videos using a convolutional network architecture, which incorporates both color and motion features. We propose a new human body pose dataset, FLIC-motion, that extends the FLIC dataset [1] with additional motion features. We apply our architecture to this dataset and report significantly better perf...

Yersinia pseudotuberculosis forms biofilms on Caenorhabditis elegans which block nematode feeding. This genetically amenable host-pathogen model has important implications for biofilm development on living, motile surfaces. Here we show that Y. pseudotuberculosis biofilm development on C. elegans is governed by N-acylhomoserine lactone (AHL)-mediated quorum sensing (QS) since (i) AHLs are produ...