Clostridium perfringens beta toxin is only produced by types B and C and plays an important role in many human and animal diseases, causing fatal conditions that originate in the intestines. We compared the expression of C. perfringens type B vaccine strain recombinant beta toxin gene in the Escherichia coli strains RosettaTM(DE3) and BL21(DE3). The beta toxin gene was extracted from pJETβ and ...

A halotolerant yeast, Pichia farinosa KK1 strain, produces a unique killer toxin termed SMK toxin (salt-mediated killer toxin) which shows its maximum killer activity in the presence of 2 M NaCl. The toxin consists of two distinct subunits, alpha and beta, which are tightly linked without a disulfide bond under acidic conditions, even in the presence of 6 M urea. Under neutral conditions, howev...

A regulatory gene (dtxR) responsible for iron-dependent repression of the toxin (tox) and siderophore genes in Corynebacterium diphtheriae was cloned and characterized. A DNA fragment carrying dtxR repressed expression of a tox-lacZ gene fusion in Escherichia coli DH5 alpha in a high-iron environment but not under low-iron conditions. A protein with mobility corresponding to approximately 28 to...

Clostridium perfringens type C strains that produce various toxins cause hemorrhagic noxious ulceration or mucousal necrosis of the small intestine in humans, pigs, cattle and chickens (Sakurai et al. 1997, Sakurai and Nagahama 2006). In humans, the bacteria cause necrotic enteritis, which is termed “pig-bel” (Sakurai and Nagahama 2006). C. perfringens has been classified into five types, A to ...

abrin known as ribosome inactivating protein’s (rip) it is a high cytotoxic plant protein. high lethality and low cost and easy access to plant and seeds lead to this toxin used in crimes and terrorist acts. because obtaining purified toxins requires advanced laboratory equipment and complex procedures, so, it appears that the perpetrators of such crimes use crude extracts. as a result, remaini...

Recombinant beta-toxin from Clostridium perfringens type C was found to increase the conductance of bilayer lipid membranes (BLMs) by inducing channel activity. The channels exhibited a distribution of conductances within the range of 10 to 380 pS, with the majority of the channels falling into two categories of conductance at 110 and 60 pS. The radii of beta-toxin pores found for the conductan...

The most common complications of varicella are bacterial skin and soft tissue infections, generally due to Staphylococcus aureus and group A beta-hemolytic streptococci. The aim of this study was to characterize the toxin and antibiotic resistance profiles of S. aureus isolates involved in varicella complications. Between 2002 and 2007, the French Reference Centre for Staphylococci collected 58...

Clostridium perfringens produces numerous toxins, which are responsible for severe diseases in man and animals. Delta toxin is one of the three hemolysins released by a number of C. perfringens type C and possibly type B strains. Delta toxin was characterized to be cytotoxic for cells expressing the ganglioside G(M2) in their membrane. Here we report the genetic characterization of Delta toxin ...

A cytolytic toxin gene encoding a 30.1-kDa Cyt2Bb1 toxin protein from B. thuringiensis subsp. jegathasan was cloned employing a limited-growth PCR screening method with forward and reverse oligonucleotide primers designed from N-terminal amino acid sequences of native and trypsin-cleaved protein, respectively. The expressed protein showed little cross-reactivity to the antibody raised against t...