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Pathogenic Microbiology Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Pathogenic Microbiology

Overexpressing Two Helicobacter Pylori Small Rnas From A Bacterial Pathogenicity-Related Chromosomal Region To Investigate Their Regulation Of Virulence Genes, Roxanne N. Mcpeck, Olivia F. Morgan, Andrea R. Castillo Phd May 2023

Overexpressing Two Helicobacter Pylori Small Rnas From A Bacterial Pathogenicity-Related Chromosomal Region To Investigate Their Regulation Of Virulence Genes, Roxanne N. Mcpeck, Olivia F. Morgan, Andrea R. Castillo Phd

2023 Symposium

The bacterial pathogen Helicobacter pylori infects the stomachs of approximately 50% of humanity, causing symptomatic disease (e.g., stomach ulcers, gastric cancer, and MALT lymphoma) in 10-15% of the infected. Colonizing the acidic, inhospitable stomach requires H. pylori to tightly regulate gene expression despite lacking many common bacterial genetic regulatory elements. The pathogen may compensate by using abundant non-protein-coding small RNAs (sRNAs) to regulate gene expression, including of infection-intensifying virulence genes. Additionally, severe disease and cancer correlate with infection by H. pylori strains that contain a nonessential chromosomal region, the cytotoxin-associated gene pathogenicity island (cagPAI). This encodes powerful virulence …


Comparative Genomics Of Microbial Chemoreceptor Sequence, Structure, And Function, Aaron Daniel Fleetwood Dec 2014

Comparative Genomics Of Microbial Chemoreceptor Sequence, Structure, And Function, Aaron Daniel Fleetwood

Doctoral Dissertations

Microbial chemotaxis receptors (chemoreceptors) are complex proteins that sense the external environment and signal for flagella-mediated motility, serving as the GPS of the cell. In order to sense a myriad of physicochemical signals and adapt to diverse environmental niches, sensory regions of chemoreceptors are frenetically duplicated, mutated, or lost. Conversely, the chemoreceptor signaling region is a highly conserved protein domain. Extreme conservation of this domain is necessary because it determines very specific helical secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structures of the protein while simultaneously choreographing a network of interactions with the adaptor protein CheW and the histidine kinase CheA. This dichotomous …


Ecology And Genetic Structure Of A Northern Temperate Vibrio Cholerae Population Related To Toxigenic Isolates, Brian M. Schuster, Anna L. Tyzik, Rachel A. Donner, Megan J. Striplin, Salvador Almagro-Moreno Sep 2011

Ecology And Genetic Structure Of A Northern Temperate Vibrio Cholerae Population Related To Toxigenic Isolates, Brian M. Schuster, Anna L. Tyzik, Rachel A. Donner, Megan J. Striplin, Salvador Almagro-Moreno

Dartmouth Scholarship

Although Vibrio cholerae is an important human pathogen, little is known about its populations in regions where the organism is endemic but where cholera disease is rare. A total of 31 independent isolates confirmed as V. cholerae were collected from water, sediment, and oysters in 2008 and 2009 from the Great Bay Estuary (GBE) in New Hampshire, a location where the organism has never been detected. Environmental analyses suggested that abundance correlates most strongly with rainfall events, as determined from data averaged over several days prior to collection. Phenotyping, genotyping, and multilocus sequence analysis (MLSA) revealed a highly diverse endemic …