Acquisition of iron is necessary for the replication of nearly all bacterial pathogens; however, iron of vertebrate hosts is mostly sequestered by heme and bound to hemoglobin within red blood cells. In Bacillus anthracis, the spore-forming agent of anthrax, the mechanisms of iron scavenging from hemoglobin are unknown. We report here that B. anthracis secretes IsdX1 and IsdX2, two NEAT domain ...

Bacillus anthracis is an endemic soil bacterium that exhibits two different lifestyles. In the soil environment, B. anthracis undergoes a cycle of saprophytic growth, sporulation, and germination. In mammalian hosts, the pathogenic lifestyle of B. anthracis is spore germination followed by vegetative cell replication, but cells do not sporulate. During infection, and in specific culture conditi...

Anti-protective antigen antibody was reported to enhance macrophage killing of ingested Bacillus anthracis spores, but it was unclear whether the antibody-mediated macrophage killing mechanism was directed against the spore itself or the vegetative form emerging from the ingested and germinating spore. To address this question, we compared the killing of germination-proficient (gp) and germinat...

Anthrax is an important zoonotic disease worldwide that is caused by Bacillus anthracis, a spore-forming pathogenic bacterium. A rapid and sensitive method to detect B. anthracis is important for anthrax risk management and control in animal cases to address public health issues. However, it has recently become difficult to identify B. anthracis by using previously reported molecular-based meth...

To isolate and detect anthrax spores form soil in different regions of Iran in order to find the anthrax foci‚ a total of 668 environmental specimens were collected during 2003-2004. Bacterial endospores were extracted from soil specimens via flotation in distilled water, incubation at room temperature, filtration, heat shock and culture on blood agar and selective PLET media. Bacillus anthraci...

Anthrax Anthrax is a zoonotic disease caused by the spore-forming bacterium Bacillus anthracis. The term anthrax is derived from the Greek word for coal, anthrakis, because of the black skin lesions characteristic of the disease. A disease that appears to have been anthrax was described in the biblical book of Exodus as the fifth plague in about 1490 BCE. Descriptions of anthrax affecting both ...

The lantibiotic nisin has previously been reported to inhibit the outgrowth of spores from several Bacillus species. However, the mode of action of nisin responsible for outgrowth inhibition is poorly understood. By using B. anthracis Sterne 7702 as a model, nisin acted against spores with a 50% inhibitory concentration (IC(50)) and an IC(90) of 0.57 microM and 0.90 microM, respectively. Viable...

In an ongoing Microbial Observatory investigation of the International Space Station (ISS), 11 Bacillus strains (2 from the Kibo Japanese experimental module, 4 from the U.S. segment, and 5 from the Russian module) were isolated and their whole genomes were sequenced. A comparative analysis of the 16S rRNA gene sequences of these isolates showed the highest similarity (>99%) to the Bacillus ant...

The causative agent of anthrax, Bacillus anthracis, is capable of circumventing the humoral and innate immune defense of the host and modulating the blood chemistry in circulation to initiate a productive infection. It has been shown that the pathogen employs a number of strategies against immune cells using secreted pathogenic factors such as toxins. However, interference of B. anthracis with ...