Bacterial urease, particularly from Proteus mirabilis, has been implicated as a contributing factor in the formation of urinary and kidney stones, obstruction of urinary catheters, and pyelonephritis. Weekly urine specimens (n = 1,135) from 32 patients, residing at two chronic-care facilities, with urinary catheters in place for greater than or equal to 30 days yielded 5,088 phenotypically and ...

XerC and XerD are two site-specific recombinases, which act on different sites to maintain replicons in a monomeric state. This system, which was first discovered and studied in Escherichia coli, is present in several species including Proteus mirabilis, where the XerD recombinase was previously characterized by our laboratory. In this paper, we report the presence of the xerC gene in P. mirabi...

Urinary tract infection by Proteus mirabilis depends on several virulence properties that are coordinately regulated with swarming differentiation. Here we report the antibacterial and anti-swarming effect of seventeen terpenoids, and the effect of subinhibitory concentrations of five selected terpenoids on swarming, biofilm formation and haemolysin activity. The results showed that all the ter...

The expression of R-factor-mediated resistance to tetracycline has been compared in Proteus mirabilis and Escherichia coli. Resistance to a range of concentrations of tetracycline was significantly lower in P. mirabilis than in E. coli in both induced and repressed states. Indirect evidence showed that conditions which result in a marked increase in the level of resistance of P. mirabilis harbo...

Gammaproteobacteria are important gut microbes but only persist at low levels in the healthy gut. The ecology of Gammaproteobacteria in the gut environment is poorly understood. Here, we demonstrate that choline is an important growth substrate for representatives of Gammaproteobacteria. Using Proteus mirabilis as a model, we investigate the role of choline metabolism and demonstrate that the c...

Proteus mirabilis commonly infects the complicated urinary tract and is associated with urolithiasis. Stone formation is caused by bacterial urease, which hydrolyzes urea to ammonia, causing local pH to rise, and leads to the subsequent precipitation of magnesium ammonium phosphate (struvite) and calcium phosphate (apatite) crystals. To prevent these infections, we vaccinated CBA mice with form...

The genus Proteus along with genus Providencia and Morganella belongs to the tribe Proteeae of the family Enterobacteriaceae. The genus Proteus currently consists of four named species (P.mirabilis, P.penneri, P.vulgaris, P.myxofaciens) and four unnamed genomospecies (3, 4, 5, and 6). Genomospecies 3 was named Proteus hauseri to honor Hauser who first described the genus. [13] Both P. mirabilis...

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a systemic and arthritic autoimmune disease affecting millions of people throughout the world. During the last 4 decades extensive data indicate that subclinical urinary tract infection by Proteus mirabilis has a role in the aetiopathogenesis of RA based on cross-reactivity or molecular mimicry between Proteus haemolysin and RA-associated HLA-DRB1 alleles as well as...