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Bordetella Pertussis Can Be Motile And Express Flagellum-Like Structures, Cassandra L. Hoffman, Laura A. Gonyar, Federico Zacca, Federico Sisti, Julieta Fernandez, Ting Wong, F. Heath Damron, Erik L. Hewlett

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

ABSTRACT Bordetella bronchiseptica encodes and expresses a flagellar apparatus. In contrast, Bordetella pertussis, the causative agent of whooping cough, has historically been described as a nonmotile and nonflagellated organism. The previous statements that B. pertussis was a nonmotile organism were consistent with a stop codon located in the flagellar biosynthesis gene, flhA, discovered when the B. pertussis Tohama I genome was sequenced and analyzed by Parkhill et al. in 2003 (J. Parkhill, M. Sebaihia, A. Preston, L. D. Murphy, et al., Nat Genet, 35:32– 40, 2003, https://doi.org/10 .1038/ng1227). The stop codon has subsequently been found in all annotated genomes. Parkhill …