A food poisoning outbreak affected 114 female Malay students staying in a religious secondary school hostel in Klang. The students developed an illness mainly characterized by abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting and giddiness. The median incubation period in this outbreak was 2.5 hours. Laboratory examination of suspected food revealed 2.3 X106 Bacillus cereus organisms per gram of fried noodles. ...

Central nervous system infections caused by Bacillus cereus have rarely been reported in infants. In this paper, the case of a 2-month-old low-birth-weight female who developed meningitis 45 days after resolution of a bloodstream infection (BSI) is described. The pulsed-field gel electrophoresis results revealed that the patterns of both B. cereus isolates responsible for the acute meningitis a...

Bacillus cereus isolates have been described harboring Bacillus anthracis toxin genes, most notably B. cereus G9241, and capable of causing severe and fatal pneumonias. This report describes the characterization of a B. cereus isolate, BcFL2013, associated with a naturally occurring cutaneous lesion resembling an anthrax eschar. Similar to G9241, BcFL2013 is positive for the B. anthracis pXO1 t...

Transcriptional profiling highlighted a subset of genes encoding putative multidrug transporters in the pathogen Bacillus cereus that were up-regulated during stress produced by bile salts. One of these multidrug transporters (BC4707) was selected for investigation. Functional characterization of the BC4707 protein in Escherichia coli revealed a role in the energized efflux of xenobiotics. Phen...

Bacillus cereus strains were tested for production of diarrheal enterotoxin by the reverse passive latex agglutination test and for presence of B. cereus enterotoxin gene (bceT) by polymerase chain reaction. About 50% of 56 B. cereus strains reacted positive in broth culture in the reverse passive latex agglutination test, while the bceT gene was detected in 41.1%. Sixteen percent of the strain...

Unlike Escherichia coli, Bacillus cereus T appears to accumulate Mg(2+) in its cell sap against a concentration gradient. Over a range of Mg(2+) in the growth medium from 5 x 10(-5) to 1.35 x 10(-2)m, the concentration of Mg(2+) in the cell sap of B. cereus T was maintained at about 6 x 10(-3)m, and ribosome-bound Mg(2+) and spermidine, as well as the spermidine concentration in the cell sap, a...

The Bacillus cereus group comprises nine species, several of which are pathogenic. Differentiating between isolates that may cause disease and those that do not is a matter of public health and economic importance, but can be particularly challenging due to the high genomic similarity of the group. To this end, we have developed BTyper, a computational tool that employs a combination of (i) vir...

Among the facultative bacteria capable of growth on mesquite wood which were isolated from the asceptically dissected hind-gut of the termite Reticulitermes hesperus were two strains of Bacillus cereus, one strain each of Arthrobacter, Alcaligenes and Serratia, and a very small Gram-negative fermentative rod. The B. cereus strains, the Serratia marcescens strain and the Arthrobacter sp. grew we...

Bacillus cereus behaves as an opportunistic pathogen frequently causing gastrointestinal diseases, and it is increasingly recognized to be responsible for severe local or systemic infections. Pathogenicity of B. cereus mainly relies on the secretion of a wide array of toxins and enzymes and also on the ability to undergo swarming differentiation in response to surface-sensing. In this report, t...