Novel Burkholderia mallei Virulence Factors Linked to Specific Host-Pathogen Protein Interactions.

Novel Burkholderia mallei Virulence Factors Linked to Specific Host-Pathogen Protein Interactions. Mol Cell Proteomics. 2013 Jun 24; Authors: Memisevic V, Zavaljevski N, Pieper R, Rajagopala SV, Kwon K, Townsend K, Yu C, Yu X, Deshazer D, Reifman J, Wallqvist A Abstract Burkholderia mallei is an infectious intracellular pathogen whose virulence and resistance to antibiotics makes it a potential bioterrorism agent. Given its genetic origin as a commensal soil organism, it is equipped with an extensive and varied set of adapted mechanisms to cope with and modulate host-cell environments. One essential virulence mechanism constitutes the specialized secretion systems that are designed to penetrate host-cell membranes and insert pathogen proteins directly into the host cell's cytosol. However, the secretion systems' proteins and, in particular, their host targets are largely uncharacterized. Here, we used a combined in silico, in vitro, and in vivo approach to identify B. mallei proteins required for pathogenicity. We used bioinformatics tools, including orthology detection and ab initio predictions of secretion system proteins, as well as published experimental Burkholderia data to initially select a small number of proteins as putative virulence factors. We then used yeast two-hybrid assays against normalized whole human and whole murine proteome libraries to detect and identify interactions between each of these bacterial proteins and host prot...
Source: Molecular and Cellular Proteomics : MCP - Category: Molecular Biology Authors: Tags: Mol Cell Proteomics Source Type: research