We have recently reported (D.L. Stevens, K.A. Maier, B.M. Laine, and J.E. Mitten, J. Infect. Dis. 155:220-228, 1987) that clindamycin, rifampin, and tetracycline were more efficacious than penicillin in the treatment of fulminant gas gangrene in mice caused by Clostridium perfringens. We hypothesize that antibiotic efficacy correlated with bactericidal or toxin-suppressing properties of these a...

Enterotoxaemia is a disease with a high associated mortality rate, affecting beef and veal calves worldwide, caused by C. perfringens alpha toxin and perfringolysin. A longitudinal study was conducted to determine the dynamics of antibodies against these toxins in 528 calves on 4 beef and 15 veal farms. The second study aimed to determine the effect of solid feed intake on the production of ant...

Chemical extraction and analysis ofreaction mixtures of preparations of staphylococcal alpha toxin and human plasma ~-lipoproteln (HDL) indicated that the cholesteryl esters which form an integral part of the lipoprotein molecules were de-esterified by the toxin preparations with no apparent destruction of the cholesterol moiety° This report is the first of cholesterol esterase produced by stap...

The Clostridium perfringens alpha-toxin has previously been implicated as the major virulence factor in necrotic enteritis in chickens, although definitive proof has not been reported. In this study an alpha-toxin mutant was constructed in a virulent chicken isolate and shown to retain full virulence in a chicken disease model. These results demonstrated that alpha-toxin is not an essential vir...

Staphylococcal alpha-toxin and a toxin fragment were labeled with N-succinimidyl[2,3-3H]propionate. The labeled compounds retained greater than 95% biological activity. The distribution of labeled staphylococcal alpha-toxin and alpha-toxin fragment after intravenous administration to BALB/c mice was studied with whole-body and microautoradiography. The animals were divided into three groups tha...

Aiming to investigate in vitro alternatives, a test for neutralizing antibody detection using cell culture was developed. This test was more sensitive than previous animal models, allowing for detection of substantially lower alpha toxin and anti-alpha toxin titers. Titers observed during in vivo and in vitro seroneutralization had a correlation of 99.12%, indicating that cell culture is a viab...

Clostridium perfringens alpha toxin is the main lethal toxin which has been identified as an enzyme, phospholipase C (EC 3.1.4.3) (8). C. perfringens requires meat digest to produce the toxin in large quantity (1, 7, 22). Factors affecting the production of the toxin were studied in a chemically defined medium (11-13). A large quantity of L-arginine (10 mg/ml ) and controlled quantities of L-cy...

Background and Objective: In Indonesia, diphtheria cases caused by Corynebacterium diphtheriae are still occurring until today. One of the causes is probably the diphtheria toxin repressor (dtxR) gene which influences toxin expression. Therefore, in this study the characterization of the gene was performed to determine the mutations that affect the DtxR protein.   Methods: The dtxR genes of ...

Staphylococcus aureus and Clostridium perfringens are two major bacteria that infect open wounds and delay the healing process. The rapid and progressive deterioration of soft tissue during S. aureus and C. perfringens coinfections is due to analogous necrotic alpha toxins produced by the two organisms. The aim of this study was to determine the alpha toxins of S. aureus and C. perfringens by d...

Selection can favor reproductive altruism if an altruism allele aids copies of itself by helping relatives. The alternative "greenbeard" mechanism, in which an allele directly recognizes and aids copies of itself in others, is generally thought to be too complex for a single gene to carry out. The csA gene in Dictyostelium discoideum acts as a single-gene greenbeard. When wild-type cells are mi...