Histo-blood group antigens (HBGAs) are a source of antigenic variation between individuals that modulates resistance and susceptibility to pathogens and is a barrier to the spread of enveloped viruses. HBGAs are also produced by a few prokaryotes where they are synthesized by glycosyltransferases (GTs) related to human HBGA synthases. Here we report the first structure of a bacterial GT of this...

A bacterial agglutination assay, a toxin-neutralizing assay, and an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) were used to compare antibodies against intestinal Aeromonas strains in serum samples from healthy carriers (n = 6), from patients with acute (n = 15) or chronic (n = 8) gastroenteritis, from patients with gastroenteritis caused by other enteropathogenic bacteria (n = 3), and from healt...

There has been renewed interest in the laboratory diagnosis of Clostridium difficile infections due in large measure to the increase in both numbers and severity of cases of this disease. For the past two decades, enzyme-immunoassays (EIAs) for the detection of first C. difficile toxin A and then toxins A and B have been the most widely used diagnostic test for diagnosis of C. difficile infecti...

The Shiga toxigenic Escherichia coli (STEC) O113:H21 strain 98NK2, which was responsible for an outbreak of hemolytic uremic syndrome, secretes a highly potent and lethal subtilase cytotoxin that is unrelated to any bacterial toxin described to date. It is the prototype of a new family of AB 5 toxins, comprising a single 35-kilodalton (kD) A subunit and a pentamer of 13-kD B subunits. The A sub...

Assessing the neutralization capability of nonlethal but medically relevant toxins in venom has been a challenging task. Nowadays, neutralization efficacy is evaluated based simply on the survival rates of animals injected with antivenom together with a predefined dose of venom, which can determine potency against neurotoxicity but not validate the capability to neutralize cytotoxin-induced com...

Seasonal influenza has considerable impact around the world, both economically and in mortality among risk groups. The long term patterns of disease are hard to capture with simple models, while the interplay of epidemiological processes with antigenic evolution makes detailed modelling difficult and computationally intensive. We identify a number of characteristic features of flu incidence tim...