Danofloxacin (CP-76,136) is in a class of agents that inhibit DNA gyrase and trigger induction of the SOS response and temperate bacteriophages. Killing studies against the bovine pathogen Pasteurella haemolytica demonstrated that danofloxacin exhibits particularly rapid killing kinetics. Here, lysogenic Escherichia coli bearing lambda is found to be more sensitive to danofloxacin than nonlysog...

The LexA protein of Escherichia coli represses the damage-inducible SOS regulon, which includes genes for repair of DNA. Surprisingly, lexA null mutations in Salmonella enterica are lethal even with a sulA mutation, which corrects lexA lethality in E. coli. Nine suppressors of lethality isolated in a sulA mutant of S. enterica had lost the Fels-2 prophage, and seven of these (which grew better)...

Prophages are quiescent viruses located in the chromosomes of bacteria. In the human pathogen, Staphylococcus aureus, prophages are omnipresent and are believed to be responsible for the spread of some antibiotic resistance genes. Here we demonstrate that release of phages from a subpopulation of S. aureus cells enables the intact, prophage-containing population to acquire beneficial genes from...

Prophages make up 12% of the enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli genome and play prominent roles in the evolution and virulence of this food-borne pathogen. Acquisition and loss of and rearrangements within prophage regions are the primary causes of differences in pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) patterns among strains of E. coli O157:H7. Sp11 and Sp12 are two tandemly integrated and puta...

Type III secretion (T3S) plays a pivotal role in the colonization of ruminant hosts by Enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC). The T3S system translocates effector proteins into host cells to promote bacterial attachment and persistence. The repertoire and variation in prophage regions underpins differences in the pathogenesis and epidemiology of EHEC strains. In this study, we have used a c...

Brucella species are important human and animal pathogens. Though, only little is known about mobile genetic elements of these highly pathogenic bacteria. To date, neither plasmids nor temperate phages have been described in brucellae. We analyzed genomic sequences of various reference and type strains and identified a number of putative prophages residing within the Brucella chromosomes. By in...

Bacteriophage B3 is a transposable phage of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. In this report, we present the complete DNA sequence and annotation of the B3 genome. DNA sequence analysis revealed that the B3 genome is 38,439 bp long with a G+C content of 63.3%. The genome contains 59 proposed open reading frames (ORFs) organized into at least three operons. Of these ORFs, the predicted proteins from 41 OR...

CRISPR-Cas systems constitute adaptive immune systems for antiviral defense in bacteria. We investigated the occurrence and diversity of CRISPR-Cas systems in 48 Bifidobacterium genomes to gain insights into the diversity and co-evolution of CRISPR-Cas systems within the genus and investigate CRISPR spacer content. We identified the elements necessary for the successful targeting and inference ...

To optimize Bacillus subtilis as a production strain for proteins and low molecular substances by genome engineering, we developed a markerless gene deletion system. We took advantage of a general property of the phosphoenolpyruvate-dependent phosphotransferase system (PTS), in particular the mannose PTS. Mannose is phosphorylated during uptake by its specific transporter (ManP) to mannose 6-ph...

Prophages switch from lysogenic to lytic mode in response to the host SOS response. The primary factor that governs this switch is a phage repressor, which is typically a host RecA-dependent autocleavable protein. Here, in an effort to reveal the mechanism underlying the phenotypic differences between the Salmonella temperate phages SPC32H and SPC32N, whose genome sequences differ by only two n...