Commercial broiler chicks were given a three-strain composite of bacitracin-resistant Clostridium perfringens by oral gavage and were sampled periodically to determine the dynamics of C. perfringens colonization of the intestinal tract of broiler chickens and fecal shedding. After gavage, the chicks were divided into two groups and placed in isolators, one group received a traditional corn-base...

BACKGROUND Although useful for probing bacterial pathogenesis and physiology, current random mutagenesis systems suffer limitations for studying the toxin-producing bacterium Clostridium perfringens. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS An EZ-Tn5-based random mutagenesis approach was developed for use in C. perfringens. This mutagenesis system identified a new regulatory locus controlling toxin pro...

The effectiveness as antimicrobials of lactic acid bacteria produced compounds reuterin and nisin was assessed against vegetative cells and spores of Clostridium perfringens isolates (from ovine milk obtained in farms with diarrheic lambs) and C. perfringens CECT 486 (type A toxin producer). We also tested the inhibitory effect of lysozyme and sodium nitrite on Clostridium. Minimal inhibitory c...

Clostridium difficile and C. perfringens are enteric pathogens affecting a variety of mammals. This study evaluated the molecular enterotoxigenicity of Clostridium swine isolates by PCRs. One hundred and ten swine faeces were analyzed by culture assay. The faecal samples were from sixty-seven healthy animals and 43 with gastrointestinal tract disease. C. difficile strains were PCR-screened for ...

Clostridium perfringens enterotoxin (CPE) is an important virulence factor involved in C. perfringens food poisoning and other gastrointestinal illnesses. In our experiment a Clostridium perfringens enterotoxin gene (cpe) positive type C strain was obtained by multiplex PCR from 34 C. perfringens isolates from goat in Guizhou Province, China. Th en a pair of specifi c primers was designed and s...

Clostridium perfringens is an anaerobic, Gram-positive bacterium that causes a range of diseases in humans, including lethal gas gangrene. We have recently shown that strains of C. perfringens move across the surface of agar plates by a unique type IV pilus (TFP)-mediated social motility that had not been previously described. Based on sequence homology to pilins in Gram-negative bacteria, C. p...

Clostridium perfringens is one of the five major food borne pathogens in the western world (expressed in cases per year). Symptoms are caused by an enterotoxin, for which 6% of type A strains carry the structural gene. This enterotoxin is released when ingested cells sporulate in the small intestine. Research on C. perfringens has been limited to a couple of strains that sporulate well in Dunca...

In both humans and animals, Clostridium perfringens is an important cause of histotoxic infections and diseases originating in the intestines, such as enteritis and enterotoxemia. The virulence of this Gram-positive, anaerobic bacterium is heavily dependent upon its prolific toxin-producing ability. Many of the ∼16 toxins produced by C. perfringens are encoded by large plasmids that range in si...

In developing Clostridium perfringens as a safe vaccine vector, the alpha toxin gene (plc) in the bacterial chromosome must be permanently inactivated. Disrupting genes in C. perfringens by traditional mutagenesis methods is very difficult. Therefore, we developed a new strategy using group II intron-based Target-Tron technology to inactivate the plc gene in C. perfringens ATCC 3624. Western bl...

Published criteria for implicating Clostridium perfringens as the cause of food-poisoning outbreaks include finding a median fecal C. perfringens spore count of greater than 10(6)/g among specimens from ill persons. We investigated a food-poisoning outbreak with the epidemiologic characteristics of C. perfringens-related disease in a nursing home in which the median fecal spore count for ill pa...