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Characterization Of The Omptin Protease, Ompt, In Escherichia Coli, Amanda Yates, Eun-Hae Kim, Helen Wing
Characterization Of The Omptin Protease, Ompt, In Escherichia Coli, Amanda Yates, Eun-Hae Kim, Helen Wing
Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)
Omptins are outer membrane proteases found in gram negative bacteria that cause diseases in humans, such as pathogenic Escherichia coli, Shigella flexneri, Salmonella typhimurium, and Yersinia pestis. Bacterial species that express omptins cause diseases such as highly fatal plague and severe diarrhea and dysentery. The genes that encode these proteases are ompT, icsP, pgtE, and pla, respectively. These proteases are highly related in structure and share approximately 50% sequence identity. In S. flexneri, IcsP has been shown to cleave a key virulence determinant, IcsA (Egile et al., 1997). IcsA recruits host actin and allows for intracellular movement within host cells …
The Effects Of Host Physiological Conditions On The Expression Of Icsp In Shigella Flexneri, Karen Levy, Helen Wing
The Effects Of Host Physiological Conditions On The Expression Of Icsp In Shigella Flexneri, Karen Levy, Helen Wing
Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)
Shigella flexneri is a gram-negative bacterium capable of causing diarrhea and dysentery known as shigellosis. It is estimated there are 167.4 million shigellosis episodes throughout the world each year causing 1.1 million deaths. Shigella invades cells in the lower intestine through an induced phagocytosis. Once in the cytoplasm, bacteria move from one cell to another using actin-based motility. The Shigella outer membrane protease IcsP regulates actin-based motility and cell-to-cell spread by cleaving the actin assembly protein IcsA from the bacterial cell surface. We hypothesize that IcsP may serve additional functions during infection. By examining which environmental signals trigger icsP expression, …