The genus of Salmonella is very polymorphic and comprised of a number of genetically closely related serotypes. It is one of the emerging pathogen in food-borne disease which is often found in contaminated chicken eggs. Salmonella enterica is considered one of the major pathogens in public health worldwide. A total of 31 Salmonella isolates identified by specific antisera, which included Salmon...

Pseudomonas syringae is an important phyllosphere colonist that utilizes flagellum-mediated motility both as a means to explore leaf surfaces, as well as to invade into leaf interiors, where it survives as a pathogen. We found that multiple forms of flagellum-mediated motility are thermo-suppressed, including swarming and swimming motility. Suppression of swarming motility occurs between 28° an...

Burkholderia cenocepacia causes chronic and life-threatening respiratory infections in immunocompromized people. The B. cenocepacia N-acyl-homoserine lactone (AHL)-dependent quorum sensing system relies on the production of AHLs by the synthases CepI and CciI while CepR, CciR and CepR2 control expression of many genes important for pathogenesis. Downstream from, and co-transcribed with cepI, li...

Malignant catarrhal fever (MCF) is a fatal disease of cattle that, in East Africa, follows contact with wildebeest excreting alcelaphine herpesvirus 1 (AlHV-1). Recently an attenuated vaccine (atAlHV-1) was tested under experimental challenge on Friesian-Holstein (FH) cattle and gave a vaccine efficacy (VE) of approximately 90%. However testing under field conditions on an East African breed, t...

The presence of cryptic fliC alleles in the genomes of 120 strains representative of the four Shigella species was investigated. One fragment was obtained by PCR amplification of fliC, with a size varying from 1.2 to 3.2 kbp, depending on the species or serotype. After digestion with endonuclease HhaI, the number of fragments in patterns varied from three to nine, with sizes of between 115 and ...

Vaccination is the most cost-effective means of infectious disease control. Although current influenza vaccines are effective in battling closely matched strains, such vaccines have major limitations such as the requirement to produce new vaccines every season, an egg-dependent production system, long production periods, uncertainty in matching the vaccine to circulating strains, and the inabil...

Uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC) is the cause of ~75% of all urinary tract infections (UTIs) and is increasingly associated with multidrug resistance. This includes UPEC strains from the recently emerged and globally disseminated sequence type 131 (ST131), which is now the dominant fluoroquinolone-resistant UPEC clone worldwide. Most ST131 strains are motile and produce H4-type flagella. H...