ABSTRACT
Melioidosis is still a fatal disease with high mortality rate, especially, in septicemic melioidosis. Clinical manifestations of this disease are protean and mimick those of other infectious diseases. Laboratory diagnosis is often too late as the patients died before the hemocultures were positive. Thus, measurement of antibody level is of the most appropriate diagnostic approach. In the past, the use of crude or non-specific antigens may account for false-positive results and high antibody levels in normal people in endemic areas. In this study, a search for specific antigens of P. pseudomallei was carried out by using SDS-Page and immunoblot techniques. The sonic extracted antigens obtained from 30 isolates of P. pseudomallei were analysed. They all showed the same protein profiles. The sonicated antigens which were found to be specific for P. pseudomallei had the melecular weight of 21, 18, 15.5 and 13 kDa.
ABSTRACT
AbstractIn the living world that microbes exist billions year ago before plants, animals or human, only 1% of them so far are able to be cultured in the laboratory condition. Therefore, the traditional genomics study that focused on a pure culture of an organism could only investigate a negligible amount of them. Moreover, the techniques could not be used to understand the microbes’ interaction in real nature. A brand new field of “Metagenomics” also called environment genomics or community genomics is a genome-based analysis of entire communities of complexly interacting organisms in diverse ecological context. Currently, metagenome study has two approaches. First, Function-based metagenomics explore the new beneficial products that microbes in a community can produce such as enzymes, antibiotics and new compounds. Second, Sequence-based metagenomics that researchers focused on finding the identity of the organisms based on the 16S rRNA sequences. Metagenomics not only open the gate to understand the interaction of living organisms in their ecology but also has made a valuable contribution to evolutionary biology and could be applied into various fields. It could set a dawn of knowledge into the contribution of microbes’ community inside human gut in terms of digestion, absorption and the involvement to obesity. In agriculture, industry and medicine, the resultants wealth of genes and molecular structures could provide novel products from uncultured organisms. This field of metagenomics could therefore open up a new perspective to the microbial world than ever before.
ABSTRACT
Abstract Bacteriophages or phages are virus of bacteria which can be found enormously in nature together with their specific hosts. They can be classified by their type of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) and morphology of phage particle into 13 families. There are two forms of life cycle which are lytic (virulent phage) that causes bacterial lysis after complete the phage propagation to release the progeny and lysogenic (temperate phage) that integrate phage genome into bacterial genome without causing cell lysis. According to their specificity of infection, they can be used as a genetic engineering tool for cloning, phage typing to classify pathogenic bacterial strain, bio-control in food and biotechnology and also phage therapy which used phage itself or its endolysin enzyme for medical treatment especially for antibiotic resistance bacteria. The endolysins structure in general consists of catalytic domain and binding domain. They act differently to lyse Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria because of the different in cell wall compositions. When chimeric enzymes were used, they could provide killing activity with new host specificity. Additionally, researcher found the synergistic therapeutic effect when combined different phage enzymes for bacterial killing. With the specificity of bacteriophages to their host and efficiency of lysis mechanism, their applications could be enormous and we should be able to obtain a great benefit from them in the near future.
ABSTRACT
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