The phospholipases C of C. perfringens (alpha-toxin) and C. bifermentans (Cbp) show >50% amino acid homology but differ in their hemolytic and toxic properties. We report here the purification and characterisation of alpha-toxin and Cbp. The phospholipase C activity of alpha-toxin and Cbp was similar when tested with phosphatidylcholine in egg yolk or in liposomes. However, the hemolytic activi...

Biotin synthesis in Escherichia coli requires the functions of the bioH and bioC genes to synthesize the precursor pimelate moiety by use of a modified fatty acid biosynthesis pathway. However, it was previously noted that bioH has been replaced with bioG or bioK within the biotin synthetic gene clusters of other bacteria. We report that each of four BioG proteins from diverse bacteria and two ...

Previous studies suggest that the toxic soluble-oligomeric form of different amyloid proteins share a common backbone conformation, but the amorphous nature of this oligomer prevents its structural characterization by experiment. Based on molecular dynamics simulations we proposed that toxic intermediates of different amyloid proteins adopt a common, nonstandard secondary structure, called α-sh...

The design of drugs with bioinformatics methods to identify proteins and peptides with a specific toxic action is increasingly recurrent. Here, we identify toxic proteins towards the influenza A virus subtype H1N1 located at the UniProt database. Our quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) approach is based on the analysis of the linear peptide sequence with the so-called Polarity I...

Two new crystal protein genes, cry19A and orf2, isolated from Bacillus thuringiensis subsp. jegathesan were cloned and characterized. The cry19A gene encodes a 74.7-kDa protein, and the orf2 gene encodes a 60-kDa protein. Cry19A contains the five conserved blocks present in most B. thuringiensis delta-endotoxins. The ORF2 amino acid sequence is similar to that of the carboxy terminus of Cry4 pr...