Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax, is a zoonotic pathogen that is relatively common throughout the world and may cause life threatening diseases in animals and humans. There are many PCR-based assays in use for the detection of B. anthracis. While most of the developed assays rely on unique markers present on virulence plasmids pXO1 and pXO2, relatively few assays incorporate c...

Anthrax is a zoonotic disease caused by Bacillus anthracis spore-forming bacterium. Since it is primarily a disease of animals, the control in animals, and humans depend on the prevention in livestock, principally cattle, sheep, and goats. Most veterinary vaccines utilize the toxigenic, uncapsulated (pXO1+/pXO2-) B. anthracis strain 34F2 which affords protection through the production of neutra...

Lipoteichoic acid (LTA), a glycerol phosphate polymer, is a component of the envelope of Gram-positive bacteria that has hitherto not been identified in Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax. LTA synthesis in Staphylococcus aureus and other microbes is catalyzed by the product of the ltaS gene, a membrane protein that polymerizes polyglycerol phosphate from phosphatidyl glycerol. H...

Effective treatment of anthrax is hampered by our limited understanding of the pathophysiology of Bacillus anthracis infection. We used a genetically complete (pXO1(+) pXO2(+)) virulent B. anthracis strain and four isogenic toxin-null mutants to determine the effects of the anthrax edema toxin (ET; edema factor [EF] plus protective antigen [PA]) and lethal toxin (LT; lethal factor [LF] plus PA)...

Bacillus anthracis is considered to be one of the most potent biological weapons because of its highly pathogenic nature and efficiency of transmission. Routinely, a presumptive diagnosis of anthrax is achieved if the bands with predicted sizes are detected after the PCR targeted to the pag and cap genes residing on pXO1 and pXO2 plasmids, respectively. A positive control DNA prepared from the ...

The poly-γ-D-glutamic acid capsule and anthrax toxins are major virulence factors of Bacillus anthracis. Genes responsible for capsule biosynthesis are located on pXO2, whereas genes encoding the toxins, which are composed of edema factors, lethal factors, and protective antigens (PA), are located on pXO1. In this study, we found that the pag null mutation not only eliminated the production of ...

Bacillus anthracis contains two megaplasmids, pXO1 and pXO2, that are critical for its pathogenesis. Stable inheritance of pXO1 in B. anthracis is dependent upon the tubulin/FtsZ-like RepX protein encoded by this plasmid. Previously, we have shown that RepX undergoes GTP-dependent polymerization in vitro. However, the polymerization properties and localization pattern of RepX in vivo are not kn...

Anthrax toxins and capsules, which are encoded by genes located on pXO1 and pXO2, respectively, are major virulence factors of Bacillus anthracis. Our previous studies demonstrated that exposure to high-temperatures is unable to abolish the pXO1 plasmid of the Pasteur II strain, but the growth of the strain was obviously slower than that of the Sterne strain and wild-type virulent strain. To el...

The development of advanced methodologies for the detection of Bacillus anthracis has been evolving rapidly since the release of the anthrax spores in the mail in 2001. Recent advances in detection and identification techniques could prove to be an essential component in the defense against biological attacks. Sequence based such as pyrosequencing, which has the capability to determine short DN...

In vivo induced antigen technology (IVIAT) is an immuno-screening technique that identifies bacterial antigens expressed during infection and not during standard in vitro culturing conditions. We applied IVIAT to Bacillus anthracis and identified PagA, seven members of a N-acetylmuramoyl-L-alanine amidase autolysin family, three P60 family lipoproteins, two transporters, spore cortex lytic prot...