"Virulence factors" refers to specific characteristics or substances produced by microorganisms, like bacteria or viruses, that enable them to cause more severe or harmful infections or diseases in their host. These factors help the microorganisms invade, evade the immune system, and damage tissues, increasing their ability to cause illness.
Full definition
Excess labile carbon promotes the expression
of virulence factors in coral reef bacterioplankton — Anny Cárdenas, ISME
«Systems analysis of multiple regulator perturbations allows discovery of
virulence factors in Salmonella.»
For example, by performing a Description Logic (DL) query in the OWL editor Protégé 4 or a SPARQL query in an IDOBRU SPARQL server, a check of
Brucella virulence factors showed that eight of them are known protective antigens based on the biological knowledge captured within the ontology.
Kim Orth of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute has worked to elucidate the activity of
bacterial virulence factors on the molecular level, providing insights into how bacteria cause disease and how eukaryotic host cells signalin response to infection.
One central theme in PHI research is the identification and understanding of
virulence factors from various pathogens.
Until now, research has mainly focused on FIC proteins which are injected
as virulence factors by pathogenic bacteria into host cells.
«Our results are very exciting ─ we are not just talking about one molecule in one particular pathogen but rather a building block which is shared by thousands of common
virulence factors produced by many major pathogenic bacteria.
Venkateswaran agrees that they need to do more work to assess whether any dangerous pathogens are lingering in the ISS, which they hope to do by isolating intact bacteria and looking
for virulence factors, increasing the length of the DNA chains they can sequence, and expanding their analyses to include viruses.
I became fascinated by the huge arsenal of
virulence factors required by enteric pathogens in order to survive and proliferate in the gut environment.
The unit
identified virulence factors promoting the successful establishment of selected methicillin resistant S.aureus and KPC producing K.pneumoniae clones in hospitals.
Analysis of such interactions provided both verification of
known virulence factors and identification of three new putative virulence proteins.
H. pylori has
several virulence factors that interact with specific targets in the cell and directly affect the severity of gastric disease.
«We conducted standard single and multi-gene comparisons with whole - genome approaches and identified
potential virulence factors to discriminate new species from among the more traditional set.
Chemotactic machinery guides H. pylori into the damage site to colonize, and then
other virulence factors take over to make sure the site stays just as tasty in the long term by slowing repair of any damage.»
Their findings — that nanotubes and vesicles are an important part of the communications process — show that the extracellular vesicles contribute to the complexity of African trypanosomiasis through the transfer of
virulence factors between parasites and inadvertent interaction with host cells, which has a profound effect on disease, the study notes.
In addition, the group focus
on virulence factors responsible for antimicrobial drug resistance in nosocomial pathogens.
Notably, some of these enzymes present in Pds (urease, proteinase (aspartyl), and superoxide dismutase) are found in other pathogenic fungi [12], [13] and are considered
dual virulence factors [14].
Though the results of the experiment allowed Abate's lab to distinguish individual microbial species, identify antibiotic resistance genes, and
find virulence factors, he sees substantial room for improvement.
During this infection process, the bacterium produces
many virulence factors, including a lethal toxin, that allow it to subvert the host immune response.
The study, «Extracellular vesicles from Trypanosoma brucei mediate
virulence factor transfer and cause host anemia,» was supported by the National Institutes of Health under grant numbers AI039033, AI060546 and 2G12MD007592.
Dr. Sibley added, «Identification of important pathogenesis determinants on a genome - wide level will foster mechanistic studies on the function of key
parasite virulence factors and help to improve diagnosis and treatment of toxoplasmosis.»
The ability to image these first early stages of infection therefore facilitates a direct examination of the Mcf1
virulence factor neutralizing the phagocytic role of the embryonic hemocytes.
It is possible, for example, to examine the effects of a recombinant bacterial toxin on infection, but it is more difficult to examine the role of
specific virulence factors in neutralizing specific elements of the immune system, such as phagocytes.
We have generated a manually curated database, which is called Victors, to store and analyze
various virulence factors from different pathogens that infect humans and animals.
The ability of staphylococcal and streptococcal bacteria to cause disease is due to
numerous virulence factors, among which a group called Superantigens play a prominent role.
Scientists exposed animals to M1 protein, which is a
potent virulence factor derived from a subgroup of Streptococcus pyogenes that are associated with a high mortality upon infection.
Once bound to CEACAM, Helicobacter pylori can transfer additional proteins, so -
called virulence factors, to the stomach cells.
Next, Dehio's team aims to elucidate the evolutionary link between these original FIC toxins and the FIC proteins, which are injected as
virulence factors into host cells by diverse pathogens.
«Our studies showed that the GlcNAc sugar of GAC is a
critical virulence factor allowing strep to spread in the blood and tissues,» van Sorge said.
These products, including the major malarial by - product hemozoin, malarial proteins and as yet
undefined virulence factors, induce MyD88 - dependent inflammatory responses in osteoclast and osteoblast precursors, leading to increased RANKL expression (a key molecule inducing osteoclast differentiation), and over-stimulation of osteoclastogenesis favoring bone resorption.»
We assessed
major virulence factors of C. neoformans (growth at 37 °C and melanin production on niger seed (NS) or L - DOPA media), sensitivity to the antifungal drugs fluconazole (FLC) or FK506, and unisexual reproduction (self - filamentous growth)(Figure S3).
Access to both purified Mcf1 toxin and recombinant E. coli expressing the mcf1 gene makes this an
ideal virulence factor in which to study early interactions between an insect pathogen and insect phagocytes.
We have been developing the Gram - negative bacterium Photorhabdus asymbiotica as a model system in which to study cross-talk between
virulence factors developed against insects that can also be deployed against mammalian immune responses.
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.
Some
candidate virulence factors present in UM270 genome were detected and found to perform the following putative functions: a 3 - oxoacyl -[acyl - carrier - protein], catalase, capsule polysaccharide export, endoglucanase, cyclolysin secretion ATP - binding protein and diguanylate cyclase.
Rather than the
expected virulence factor, the newly discovered E. coli - specific genes helped protect the bacteria from the toxic effect of metal ions the body uses to fight infection.
The analysis also revealed that Salmonella infection increases mitochondrial abundance of the enzyme superoxide dismutase and decreases the abundance of the sorting nexin protein SNX6, most likely through the bacterial
virulence factor SopB.
In addition, the department is focusing on the study of the mechanisms for the differentiation of immune cells by
mycobacterial virulence factors to develop the effective control tools of M. tuberculosis infection.