Tetanus toxin production is triggered by the transition from amino acid consumption to peptides.

Bacteria produce some of the most potent biomolecules known, of which many cause serious diseases such as tetanus. For prevention, billions of people and countless animals are immunised with the highly effective vaccine, industrially produced by large-scale fermentation. However, toxin production is often hampered by low yields and batch-to-batch variability.

Production of the short peptide surfactant DAMP4 from glucose or sucrose in high cell density cultures of Escherichia coli BL21(DE3).

Background: Peptides are increasingly used in industry as highly functional materials. Bacterial production of recombinant peptides has the potential to provide large amounts of renewable and low cost peptides, however, achieving high product titers from Chemically Defined Media (CDM) supplemented with simple sugars remains challenging.

Results: In this work, the short peptide surfactant, DAMP4, was used as a model peptide to investigate production in Escherichia coli BL21(DE3), a classical strain used for protein production.

Insight into hyaluronic acid molecular weight control.

Hyaluronic acid (HA) is a ubiquitous polysaccharide found in humans, animals, bacteria, algae and molluscs. Simple yet sophisticated, HA demonstrates unique and valuable rheological properties. In solution, HA behaves as a stiffened random coil and the resultant behaviour, even at low concentrations, is far from Newtonian or 'ideal'.

The trehalose phosphotransferase system (PTS) in E. coli W can transport low levels of sucrose that are sufficient to facilitate induction of the csc sucrose catabolism operon.

Plasticity in substrate acceptance is a well-characterised phenomenon for disaccharide transporters. Sucrose, a non-reducing disaccharide, is usually metabolised via either the permease-mediated chromosomally-encoded sucrose catabolism (csc) regulon or the sucrose phosphotransferase system (PTS). E.

Pasteurella multocida Heddleston serovar 3 and 4 strains share a common lipopolysaccharide biosynthesis locus but display both inter- and intrastrain lipopolysaccharide heterogeneity.

Pasteurella multocida is a Gram-negative multispecies pathogen and the causative agent of fowl cholera, a serious disease of poultry which can present in both acute and chronic forms. The major outer membrane component lipopolysaccharide (LPS) is both an important virulence factor and a major immunogen. Our previous studies determined the LPS structures expressed by different P.

The role of hyaluronic acid precursor concentrations in molecular weight control in Streptococcus zooepidemicus.

The biosynthetic pathway responsible for the production of hyaluronic acid (HA) has been thoroughly studied; however, many aspects remain elusive regarding the mechanisms that control molecular weight (MW). Previously, we demonstrated a positive correlation between MW and the concentration of the HA precursor sugar UDP-N acetylglucosamine (UDP-GlcNAc). To further investigate the role of UDP-GlcNAc in MW control, we increased the intracellular concentration of this monomer using both feeding strategies and genetic engineering approaches.

Knock-in/Knock-out (KIKO) vectors for rapid integration of large DNA sequences, including whole metabolic pathways, onto the Escherichia coli chromosome at well-characterised loci.

Background: Metabolic engineering projects often require integration of multiple genes in order to control the desired phenotype. However, this often requires iterative rounds of engineering because many current insertion approaches are limited by the size of the DNA that can be transferred onto the chromosome. Consequently, construction of highly engineered strains is very time-consuming.

Saccharopolyspora erythraea's genome is organised in high-order transcriptional regions mediated by targeted degradation at the metabolic switch.

Background: Actinobacteria form a major bacterial phylum that includes numerous human pathogens. Actinobacteria are primary contributors to carbon cycling and also represent a primary source of industrial high value products such as antibiotics and biopesticides. Consistent with other members of the actinobacterial phylum, Saccharopolyspora erythraea undergo a transitional switch.

Fis is essential for capsule production in Pasteurella multocida and regulates expression of other important virulence factors.

P. multocida is the causative agent of a wide range of diseases of animals, including fowl cholera in poultry and wild birds. Fowl cholera isolates of P.

The putative coupling protein TcpA interacts with other pCW3-encoded proteins to form an essential part of the conjugation complex.

Conjugative plasmids encode antibiotic resistance determinants or toxin genes in the anaerobic pathogen Clostridium perfringens. The paradigm conjugative plasmid in this bacterium is pCW3, a 47-kb tetracycline resistance plasmid that encodes the unique tcp transfer locus. The tcp locus consists of 11 genes, intP and tcpA-tcpJ, at least three of which, tcpA, tcpF, and tcpH, are essential for the conjugative transfer of pCW3.