In this review, we advance a new concept in developing vaccines and/or drugs to target specific proteins expressed during the early stage of Bacillus anthracis (anthrax) infection and address existing challenges to this concept. Three proteins (immune inhibitor A, GPR-like spore protease, and alanine racemase) initially identified by proteomics in our laboratory were found to have differential ...

Bacillus anthracis is a spore-forming bacterium that causes anthrax in humans and in other mammals. The glycoprotein BclA (Bacillus collagen-like protein of anthracis) is a major constituent of the exosporium, the outermost surface of B. anthracis spores. The glycosyl part of BclA is an oligosaccharide composed of 2-O-methyl-4-(3-hydroxy-3-methylbutanamido)-4,6-dideoxy-d-glucose, referred to as...

Anthrax is a fatal infection of humans and livestock that is caused by the gram-positive bacterium Bacillus anthracis. The virulent strains of B. anthracis are encapsulated and toxigenic. In this paper we describe the development of a PCR technique for identifying spores of B. anthracis. Two 20-mer oligonucleotide primers specific for the capB region of 60-MDa plasmid pXO2 were used for amplifi...

The differentiation between living and dead bacterial endospores is crucial in many research areas of microbiology. The identification of inactivated, non-pathogenic Bacillus anthracis spores is one reason why improvement of decontamination protocols is so desirable. Another field interested in spore viability is planetary protection, a sub-discipline of astrobiology that estimates the bioburde...

To obtain thermostable immunoreagents specific for the spore form of Bacillus anthracis two llamas were immunized with a combination of six different recombinant proteins. These proteins BclA, gerQ, SODA1, SOD15, BxpB and the protein p5303 have all been shown as components of the B. anthracis spore and could potentially serve as targets for the detection of spores in multiplexed biosensors. Per...

In October 2001, a letter containing a large number of anthrax spores was sent through the Brentwood post office in Washington, D.C., to a United States Senate office on Capitol Hill, resulting in contamination in both places. Several thousand people who worked at these sites were screened for spore exposure by collecting nasal swab samples. We describe here a screening protocol which we, as a ...

bacillus anthracis as a spore-forming bacterium is the causative agent for anthrax. three proteins from b. anthracis including protective antigen (pa), lethal factor (lf) and edema factor (ef) are causative factors of this bacteria. to produce plant-based vaccine, fusion protein of pa 4 domain and lf 1 domain via furin cleavage site joined to subunit b vibrio cholera toxin (ctb) as an inducer o...

24 Scavenging of anthrax carcasses has long been hypothesized to play a critical role 25 in the production of the infectious spore-stage of Bacillus anthracis after host death, 26 though empirical studies assessing this are lacking. We compared B. anthracis spore 27 production, distribution and survival at naturally occurring anthrax herbivore carcasses 28 that were either experimentally caged ...

Bacillus anthracis is a Gram-positive, spore-forming soil bacterium that is closely related to Bacillus cereus and Bacillus thuringiensis. Infections with Bacillus anthracis result in a disease called anthrax (Mock and Fouet 2001; Sylvestre et al. 2002). Anthrax is primarily an infection of grazing cattle. Ingested spores germinate within the host to the vegetative form. Vegetative cells multip...