Friday 9 December 2011

Salmonella able to form 'evil twins' to evade the immune system!

The gram negative bacteria of the Salmonella spp. has demonstrated another fantastic trick in it armoury according to a group of researchers from the University of Washington, ass reported in PNAS this week.

The paper describes some really elegant work on the ability of this common food poisoning associated organism to produce two froms of the organism as it undergoes division events. One of the forms produces the normal flagella projection, used to make the organism motile, whilst other clones do not posses these projections and as such are immotile. So essentially what we have is genetically identical bacteria within which phenotypic variance is seen. One of the lead researchers Prof Brad Cookson is reported on the Science Daily Blog site as saying that the organisms ability to be genetically identical but differ in appearance is of great use to pathogenic bacteria such as the salmonellas. This diversity apparently increases the chances of some of the clones surviving in the ever changing environment of the host. The ability to swim is a potentially important survival trait especially when one considers an environment such as the intestine. The group describe the discovery of the YdiV protein which appears to control whether the flagella are produced. The researchers report that salmonella strains that lack the YdiV protein are seemingly unable to repress flagellin production and as such these mutants appear to be less infectious. This is a really interesting paper and well worth a read!

The paper citation is :

Stewart MK, Cummings LA, Johnson ML, Berezow AB, Cookson BT.
Regulation of phenotypic heterogeneity permits Salmonella evasion of the host caspase-1 inflammatory response. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011 Dec 5. [Epub ahead of print]

You can get more information on Salmonella Spp., and this paper from the folowing sources:

http://www.hpa.org.uk/Topics/InfectiousDiseases/InfectionsAZ/Salmonella/

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111208092715.htm

 http://www.microbeworld.org/index.php?option=com_jlibrary&view=article&id=7945&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=twitter

Influenza Season - its not too late to vaccinate!

Well its flu season again and we still need to protect ourselves. The publicity of Influenza A H1N1 has somewhat faded but the virus is still active along with the other strains of seasonal flu that may be present. As such it is important to remember the importance of protecting yourself via a flu vaccination. This has been recently highighted by the commencement of National Flu week (4th-10th December) as advertised by the CDC in the USA. This may have come from the States but it is a timely reminder to use here in Europe of the importance of this infectious disease. Whilst we are all potentially vulnerable to influenza, there are members of our communities that are at particular risk and these may fall into the following groups:

  • Pregnant women
  • Children younger than 5, but especially children younger than 2 years old
  • People 65 years of age and older
  • People of any age with certain chronic medical conditions
                                           (list copied from the CDC Site)

So my short heartfelt message to you is get yourself vaccinated, I decided I did not have time last year and both my Wife and I caught flu and spent a truly miserable christmas - this year we have gone and had our vaccnes as this is the single most effective way of not catching the flu!



Have a look at the CDC website : http://www.cdc.gov/Features/FightTheFlu/?s_cid=tw_cdc1063
and the HPA website in the UK for more information http://www.hpa.org.uk/Topics/InfectiousDiseases/InfectionsAZ/Influenza/

Be Safe

The other or Forgotten Malaria!

Looking at a tweet the other day from the Nature News Blog I was intriuged by the title "A new map of the 'other' malaria" heading an article about Plasmodium vivax as opposed the more comonly reported P. falciparum. The article states that the P. vivax is almost the forgotten sister to  falicparum malaria and that global eradification programs may well need to pay more attention to the activities of this parasite. So have a read of the article and see what you think!
Here is the URL http://t.co/uiTXDVl6