• Korean Journal of Veterinary Research
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.574-580
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• 1998

Anthrax caused by Bacillus anthracis is one of the most important zoonotic diseases in the worldwide. To control and prevent the disease effectively, several methods such as development of a fast and specific diagnostic method and vaccine, education etc, have been carried out. However, it still has a problem in the control and prevention. To control, the most important method is the prevention of direct or indirect contact of the causative agent with susceptible host. Therefore, we developed a fast and specific detection method, polymerase chain reaction, of B anthracis from soil and infected animals because the organism could survive long time in the environment including soil due to formation of spore. With the method, virulence genes of B anthracis were successfully amplified from experimentally infected soil and mice. Up to $4.2{\times}10$ of the organisms per gram could be detected with the PCR method from experimentally infected soil. These results suggested that this PCR method could be effectively used not only to detect B anthracis in soil and infected animal but also to provide the information to prevent the disease.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.77-81
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• 2004

The etiological agent is Bacillus anthracis, a gram-positive rod-shaped bacterium able to form spores. In order to elucidate the mechanism of infecttion on human macrophage cells, we performed two-dimensional electrophoresis and MALDI-TOF analysis using the infected human macrophage cells with the spores of B. anthracis Sterne of inactivated B. anthracis Sterne. We identified 9 proteins which related to the infection of Bacillus anthracis spores on human macrophage cells at the early stage events. Maybe nine proteins will be bio-markers and vaccine candidates to the Bacillus anthracis spore infection.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.778-783
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• 2008

Anthrax is an infectious disease caused by toxigenic strains of the Gram-positive bacterium Bacillus anthracis. To identify the mitochondrial proteins that are expressed differently in murine macrophages infected with spores of B. anthracis Sterne, proteomic and MALDI-TOF/MS analyses of uninfected and infected macrophages were conducted. As a result, 13 mitochondrial proteins with different expression patterns were discovered in the infected murine macrophages, and some were identified as ATP5b, NIAP-5, ras-related GTP binding protein B isoform CRAa, along with several unnamed proteins. Among these proteins, ATP5b is related to energy production and cytoskeletal rearrangement, whereas NIAP-5 causes apoptosis of host cells due to binding with caspase-9. Therefore, this paper focused on ATP5b, which was found to be down regulated following infection. The downregulated ATP5b also reduced ATP production in the murine macrophages infected with B. anthracis spores. Consequently, this study represents the first mitochondrial proteome analysis of infected macrophages.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.478-483
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• 2015

Decontamination of biological agents utilizes hydrogen peroxide($H_2O_2$) for its effectiveness and safeness. Bacillus anthracis is a major target for $H_2O_2$ decontamination. To assess the effect of $H_2O_2$ on B. anthracis and identify biomarkers for decontamination, whole transcriptomic profiling of $H_2O_2$-treated B. anthracis was performed. Here we identified deregulation in stress response genes, transcription factors and cellular homeostasis genes. We also found that expression of antisense RNAs increased in B. anthracis during decontamination. We postulate that B. anthracis prioritizes survival and adaptation in response to $H_2O_2$ treatment by changing its gene expression pattern.

• Korean Journal of Microbiology
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.21-27
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• 2001

Recently many investigators have devoted considerable attention to the production and purification of PA for antigens, and the preparation of new synthetic medium (RM medium) have solved to increase the yields of the PA but, the low sensitivity of the PA to detect B. anthracis infections has remained as a problem to be solved. This study was undertaken to evaluate the yields of the PA from culture filtrates of B. anthracis Sterne $34F_2$ strain in modified RM medium in which 10 g/l of $NaHCO_3$ and 10g/l of glucose were replaced by 8 g/l and 5 g/l, and the first purification step of PA from culture broth was used hydroxyapatite. The PA was purified by hydroxyapatite column chromatography, DEAE-Sepharose CL-4B column chromatography and Toyo-pearl gel filtration chromatography. The yield of PA from the modified RM medium, 8.6 mg/l.

• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.28 no.7
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• pp.1109-1113
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• 2007

Acetohydroxyacid synthase (AHAS, EC 2. 2. 1. 6) is the enzyme that catalyses the first step in the common pathway of the biosynthesis of the branched chain amino acids, valine, leucine and isoleucine. For the first time, the AHAS gene from Bacillus anthracis was cloned into the expression vector pET28a(+), and was expressed in the E. coli strain BL21(DE3). The purified enzyme was checked on 12% SDS-PAGE to be a single band with molecular weight of 65 kDa. The optimum pH and temperature for B. anthracis AHAS was at pH 7.5 and 37 oC, respectively. Kinetic parameters of B. anthracis were as follows: Km for pyruvate, K0.5 for ThDP and Mg2+ was 4.8, 0.28 and 1.16 mM respectively. AHAS from B. anthracis showed strong resistance to three classes of herbicides, Londax (a sulfonylurea), Cadre (an imidazolinone), and TP (a triazolopyrimidine). These results indicated that these herbicides could be used in the search for new anti-bacterial drugs.

• Korean Journal of Microbiology
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.56-60
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• 2001

Molecular typing of Bacillus anthracis has been extremely difficult due to the lack of polymorphic DNA markers. Aiming to develop a DNA marker specific for Bacillus anthracis and to be able to discriminate this species from Bacillus genus, we applied the random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD)-PCR. We have identified B. anthracis from various Bacillus species. The analysis performed by RAPD clearly demonstrated substantial genetic variations among Bacillus species. This type of analysis is an easy, quick and highly discriminatory technique that may help in diagnosis of anthrax.

• Archives of Pharmacal Research
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.58-61
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• 1992

Bacillus anthracis 590 having an inducibla resistance determinant to MLS antibiotics was isolated from a soli sample in Korea. The resistance gene (ernJ) was cloned by Southern blotting of chromosomal DNA fragment digested by various restriction enzymes and coloy hybridization method and the cloned plasmid was named as pBA423. The size of inserted DNA fragment of pBS42 vector was about 2.9 kb and the DNA sequence of the subcloned fragment (Hinc II-Hinc II, 1.4kb) WAS determined. The DNA sequence of ernJ was composed of 357 bp for leader region and 861 bp for the structural gene. Because the leader sequence of ernJ was homologous to that of ermK, the expression of ernJ is also thought to be controlled by a transcriptionl attenuation mechanism.

• Korean Journal of Microbiology
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.21-26
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• 2010

As the causative agent of Anthrax, Bacillus anthracis causes an acute fatal disease in herbivores such as cattle, sheep, and horses as well as humans. The therapeutics and prevention of anthrax currently available are based on antibiotics and the live attenuated vaccine strains, which may be problematic due to the emergency of antibiotic resistant strains or residual virulence in those vaccine strains. Therefore, it has been required to develop novel therapeutics and vaccines which are safer and applicable to humans. Recently, the development of the multivalent vaccine targeting both spores and vegetative cells of B. anthracis along with anthrax toxin has been reported. In our attempts to screen potential candidates for those multivalent vaccines, the whole genomic expression library of B. anthracis was constructed in this study. To the end, the partial digests of the genomic DNA from B. anthracis (ATCC 14578) with Sau3AI were ligated with the inducible pET30abc expression vectors, resulting in approximately $1{\times}10^5$ clones in E. coli BL21(DE3). The redundancy test by DNA nucleotide sequencing was performed for the randomly selected 111 clones and found 56 (50.5%) B. anthracis genes, 17 (15.3%) vector sequences, and 38 (34.2%) unknown genes with no sequence homology by BLAST. An inducible expression of the recombinant proteins was confirmed by Western blot. Interestingly, some clones could react with the antiserum against B. anthracis. These results imply that the whole genomic library constructed in this study can be applied for analyzing the immunomes of B. anthracis.

• CELLMED
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.6.1-6.12
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• 2014

Anthrax is the deadly disease for human being caused by Bacillus anthracis. Instantaneous research work on the mode of infection of the organism revealed that different proteases are involved in different steps of pathogenesis. Present study reports the in silico characterization and the detection of pathogenic proteases involved in anthrax infection through protein-protein interaction. A total of 13 acid, 9 neutral, and 1 alkaline protease of Bacillus anthracis were selected for analysing the physicochemical parameter, the protein superfamily and family search, multiple sequence alignment, phylogenetic tree construction, protein-protein interactions and motif finding. Among the 13 acid proteases, 10 were found as extracellular enzymes that interact with immune inhibitor A (InhA) and help the organism to cross the blood brain barrier during the process of infection. Multiple sequence alignment of above acid proteases revealed the position 368, 489, and 498-contained 100% conserved amino acids which could be used to deactivate the protease. Among the groups analyzed, only acid protease were found to interact with InhA, which indicated that metalloproteases of acid protease group have the capability to develop pathogenesis during B. anthracis infection. Deactivation of conserved amino acid position of germination protease can stop the sporulation and germination of B anthracis cell. The detailed interaction study of neutral and alkaline proteases could also be helpful to design the interaction network for the better understanding of anthrax disease.