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| Author(s): |
Guilherme Martines Teixeira Mendes
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | Campinas, SP. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Faculdade de Ciências Médicas |
| Defense date: | 2008-02-29 |
| Examining board members: |
Marcelo Brocchi;
Mário Paulo Amante Penatti;
Wanderley Dias da Silveira
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| Advisor: | Marcelo Brocchi |
| Abstract | |
The genus Salmonella sp is formed by gram-negative bacilli, which can be divided into 3 species: S. enterica, S. bongori and S. subterranea. The majority of the serovars pathogenic to humans is included in the subgroup I of the S. enterica species. The infection with S. enterica starts either the ingestion of contaminated water or food. These microorganisms are facultative intracellular pathogens and, once ingested, they have the capacity to adhere and invade cells of the intestinal mucosa, with preference for M cells. Then, S. enterica can invade and proliferate within vacuoles of immune cells, particularly macrophages, achieving different organs and tissues of the host, causing systemic infection. Mutant strains of S. enterica with attenuation of the virulence but that are still able to cause a transient infection, are good candidates for potential live oral vaccines. These mutants are also good carriers of heterologous antigens to cells of the immunological system, been able to induce an effective immunological response. To the best of our knowledge, no mutants of this type were developed in Brazil leading to the needed to pay royalties to foreign groups for their use. In prokaryotes the genomic DNA are associated with a number of proteins, the so called histone-like proteins, with structural and regulatory properties, forming the nucleoid. The IHF (Integration Host Factor) is one of the more abundant histone-like in prokaryotes. IHF is a heterodimeric DNA-binding protein that controls a number of cellular processes, such as DNA duplication and DNA recombination and also modulates the expression of different genes. In this work we constructed recombinant strains of S. enterica mutants for the himA and himD genes that encode for the IHF subunits using the ? Red system (Datsenko and Wanner, 2000) and tested for attenuation and immunogenicity. The mutant strains were also characterized and compared to the parental strains for other biological characteristics such as the capacity to invade and proliferate into eukaryotic cells and to survive to different stress conditions. The S. enterica himA and himD mutant strains were attenuated for virulence and able to induce a protective immunity against the wild type strain of S. enterica indicating that these recombinant strains are candidates to formulate a new live oral vaccine (AU) | |