After an epidemic of serogroup A meningococcal meningitis in northern Ghana, a gradual disappearance of the epidemic strain was observed in a series of five 6-month carriage surveys of 37 randomly selected households. As serogroup A Neisseria meningitidis carriage decreased, an epidemic of serogroup X meningococcal carriage occurred, which reached 18% (53/298) of the people sampled during the dry season of 2000, coinciding with an outbreak of serogroup X disease. These carriage patterns were unrelated to that of Neisseria lactamica. Multilocus sequence typing and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis of the serogroup X bacteria revealed strong similarity with other strains isolated in Africa during recent decades. Three closely related clusters with distinct patterns of spread were identified among the Ghanian isolates, and further microevolution occurred after they arrived in the district. The occurrence of serogroup X outbreaks argues for the inclusion of this serogroup into a multivalent conjugate vaccine against N. meningitidis.
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PLoS Negl Trop Dis
January 2025
Research Center for Swine Diseases, College of Veterinary Medicine, Sichuan Agricultural University, Chengdu, China.
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View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Immunol
January 2025
Faculty of Biosciences and Aquaculture, Nord University, Bodø, Norway.
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View Article and Find Full Text PDFExpert Rev Vaccines
December 2025
South Africa Medical Research Council Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Health Science, Johannesburg, South Africa.
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Viruses
January 2025
Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, College of Veterinary Medicine, Chungnam National University, Daejeon 34134, Republic of Korea.
Self-assembling ferritin nanoparticle technology is a widely used vaccine development platform for enhancing the efficacy of subunit vaccines by displaying multiple antigens on nanocages. The dengue virus (DENV) envelope domain III (EDIII) protein, the most promising antigen for DENV, has been applied in vaccine development, and it is essential to evaluate the relative immunogenicity of the EDIII protein and EDIII-conjugated ferritin to show the efficiency of the ferritin delivery system compared with EDIII. In this study, we optimized the conditions for the expression of the EDIII protein in , protein purification, and refolding, and these optimization techniques were applied for the purification of EDIII ferritin nanoparticles.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFViruses
December 2024
Department of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology, School of Life Sciences, Botswana International University of Science and Technology, Private Bag 16, Palapye 10071, Botswana.
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