Prediction of protein architectures involved in the signaling-pathway initiating sporulation in Firmicutes.

Objectives: Like many other proteins, those belonging to the signal transduction cascade initiating sporulation (Spo0 pathway) have conserved protein domains (Capra and Laub in Annu Rev Microbiol 66:325-47, 2012). Improvements in bioinformatics applications to discover proteins involved in the initiation of the sporulating cascade in newly sequenced genomes is an important task that requires rigorous comparative genomic methods and manual curation to identify endospore-forming bacteria. This note aims to present a collection of predicted proteins involved in the Spo0 pathway found in the proteomes of fully sequenced and manually curated endospore-forming Firmicutes species.

[Purification of Salmonella Typhimurium OmpD porin induces long-term high levels of antibodies: implications on the development of vaccines against non-typhoid salmonella].

In the present work, we report, for the first time, on the purification of the Salmonella Typhimurium OmpD porin. We assessed the integrity and purity of the protein and evaluated the immunogenicity of the protein and its ability to induce antibody without exogenous adjuvant. We observed that 10 μg OmpD induced high antibody levels of IgM and IgG, which were maintained for more than 260 days after immunization.