Probiotic bacterium lessens severity of Salmonella infections by hoarding iron
Results of UCI-led study point to new approach for treating foodborne illnesses
2013-07-18
(Press-News.org) Irvine, Calif., July 17, 2013 — UC Irvine microbiologists have learned how a probiotic bacterium used to treat irritable bowel syndrome can soothe gut bacterial infections caused by Salmonella, paving the way for potential relief from foodborne illnesses that affect millions of people annually.
Manuela Raffatellu, assistant professor of microbiology & molecular genetics, and colleagues at UC Irvine and the University of Washington identified how a probiotic strain of E. coli reduces Salmonella colonization by competing with this pathogen for iron, an essential nutrient that Salmonella acquires in the gut in order to replicate at high levels.
In fact, the researchers discovered that the E. coli strain called Nissle 1917 acquires iron more efficiently than does Salmonella. As a result, Salmonella counts in the gut decrease when Nissle is administered during infection. Study results appear in today's issue of Cell Host & Microbe.
"Although we focused on Salmonella, our findings suggest that this approach can be effective against other gut bacterial pathogens that need iron to grow," said Raffatellu, who's also a member of UC Irvine's Institute for Immunology. "By understanding how these 'bad bugs' get nutrients, we can further study methods to eradicate them."
Most people infected with Salmonella develop diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps 24 to 72 hours after infection. The illness usually lasts four to seven days, and the majority of affected individuals recover without treatment. According to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, about 42,000 cases of salmonellosis are reported annually in the U.S. Because many milder cases are not diagnosed or reported, the actual number of infections is estimated to be between 1 million and 4 million per year.
For nearly a century, the E. coli Nissle 1917 strain has been administered to patients with a variety of bowel disorders, but little has been known about how this probiotic bacterium works. Nissle 1917 is a key ingredient in a German probiotic product currently unavailable in the U.S. market.
###
Elisa Deriu, Janet Liu, Milad Pezeshki, Robert Edwards, Roxanna Ochoa and Heidi Contreras of UC Irvine; and Stephen J. Libby and Ferric Fang of the University of Washington contributed to the study, which was funded by Public Health Service grants AI083663 and AI77629 and an Astellas Young Investigator Award from the Infectious Diseases Society of America Education & Research Foundation/National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. Work in the Raffatellu lab is also supported by UC Irvine's Pacific Southwest Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense & Emerging Infectious Diseases (via award No. U54AI065359 from the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases).
About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UC Irvine is a top-ranked university dedicated to research, scholarship and community service. Led by Chancellor Michael Drake since 2005, UC Irvine is among the most dynamic campuses in the University of California system, with more than 28,000 undergraduate and graduate students, 1,100 faculty and 9,400 staff. Orange County's second-largest employer, UC Irvine contributes an annual economic impact of $4.3 billion. For more UC Irvine news, visit news.uci.edu.
News Radio: UC Irvine maintains on campus an ISDN line for conducting interviews with its faculty and experts. Use of this line is available for a fee to radio news programs/stations that wish to interview UC Irvine faculty and experts. Use of the ISDN line is subject to availability and approval by the university.
UCI maintains an online directory of faculty available as experts to the media. To access, visit http://www.today.uci.edu/experts.
NOTE TO EDITORS: Photo and image available at http://news.uci.edu/press-releases/probiotic-bacterium-lessens-severity-of-Salmonella-infections-by-hoarding-iron/
END
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2013-07-18
Archaeologists tunneling beneath the main temple of the ancient Maya city of El Perú-Waka' in northern Guatemala have discovered an intricately carved stone monument with hieroglyphic text detailing the exploits of a little-known sixth-century princess whose progeny prevailed in a bloody, back-and-forth struggle between two of the civilization's most powerful royal dynasties, Guatemalan cultural officials announced July 16.
"Great rulers took pleasure in describing adversity as a prelude to ultimate success," said research director David Freidel, PhD, a professor of anthropology ...
2013-07-18
A NASA engineer has achieved yet another milestone in his quest to advance an emerging super-black nanotechnology that promises to make spacecraft instruments more sensitive without enlarging their size.
A team led by John Hagopian, an optics engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., has demonstrated that it can grow a uniform layer of carbon nanotubes through the use of another emerging technology called atomic layer deposition or ALD. The marriage of the two technologies now means that NASA can grow nanotubes on three-dimensional components, ...
2013-07-18
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich., July 17, 2013 – We may be closer to predicting who is at risk for a heart attack, according to a recently published Spectrum Health study.
Researchers with Spectrum Health's Frederik Meijer Heart & Vascular Institute used new imaging technology on patients being treated for heart attacks. The imaging technology allowed researchers to identify the characteristic makeup, or signature, of arterial plaque blocking an artery and causing a heart attack.
Knowing what type of plaque is present in narrowed arteries may help a physician determine a patient's ...
2013-07-18
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — July 17, 2013 — The Side-Out Foundation's breast cancer pilot study, led by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), Translational Drug Development (TD2) and Scottsdale Healthcare, has shown that cancer patients do better when their treatment is guided by molecular profiling.
Specifically, 52 percent of patients with advanced breast cancer received clinical benefit — meaning their disease was controlled for a longer time — when their cancer was treated based on addressing the abnormal proteins in their tumor, according to the study conducted ...
2013-07-18
SAN ANTONIO (July 17, 2013) — Molecular biologists in the School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio have found a novel way to fine-tune the activity of cells' protein-disposing machinery, with potentially cancer-fighting effects.
This machinery, the proteasome, is deregulated in cancer. Agents called protease inhibitors are viewed as potential anti-cancer therapies, but they indiscriminately curb proteasome activity, which also includes protein recycling. Such strategy is effective to kill cells in aggressive blood cancers but leads ...
2013-07-18
Children whose mothers took antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) while pregnant are at increased risk of early development issues, according to a new study published in Epilepsia, a journal published by Wiley on behalf of the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE). Results of the study suggest that children exposed to AEDs in the womb were at risk for difficulties with motor development, language skills, social skills, and autistic traits compared to children whose mothers did not take anti-seizure medications.
Medical evidence suggests that epilepsy is fairly common in ...
2013-07-18
Philadelphia, PA, July 18, 2013 – Cancer researchers have wondered why ovarian cancer cells are so attracted to the abdominal cavity, especially the omentum, with the hope that such an understanding could lead to better disease management or even prevention. Results from a series of experiments suggest a two-step model of omental colonization in which i) cancer cells are attracted to and lodge within immune cell-containing structures known as milky spots, and ii) fat storage cells (adipocytes) fuel cancer cell growth and spread. This study is scheduled for publication ...
2013-07-18
[EMBARGOED FOR JULY 18, 2013] Facebook posts helped alert public health officials to a strep throat outbreak among a high school dance team in 2012, and DNA fingerprinting led investigators to pasta prepared by a previously ill parent as the likely source. Although strep throat, or Group A Streptococcus (GAS) pharyngitis, usually spreads from person to person by droplets, foodborne transmission is possible, as a report published online in Clinical Infectious Diseases found. The most common form of GAS illness is strep throat, but some cases can have more severe consequences.
Among ...
2013-07-17
The mighty tuna is more closely related to the delicate seahorse than to a marlin or sailfish. That is one of the surprises from the first comprehensive family tree, or phylogeny, of the "spiny-rayed fish," a group that includes about a third of all living vertebrate species. The work is published July 15 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The spiny-rayed fish are an incredibly diverse group, including tuna and billfish, tiny gobies and seahorses, and oddities such as pufferfish and anglerfish. The fish occupy every aquatic environment from ...
2013-07-17
Bethesda, MD—Two new studies, in Health Affairs July 2013 issue, describe health success stories outside the US.
One, by Sema Sgaier of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and colleagues, is titled "How The Avahan HIV Prevention Program Transitioned From The Gates Foundation To The Government Of India." It explains how the Gates Foundation worked with the Government of India to ensure a smooth transition of Avahan – an HIV prevention program funded and initiated by the Gates Foundation – to be run and managed by that government. The transition strategy, implemented ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Probiotic bacterium lessens severity of Salmonella infections by hoarding iron
Results of UCI-led study point to new approach for treating foodborne illnesses
