Article
New insights into the pneumococcal fratricide: relationship to clumping and identification of a novel immunity factor.
Molecular microbiology - 1 Feb 2006
Håvarstein Leiv Sigve, Martin Bernard, Johnsborg Ola, Granadel Chantal, Claverys Jean-Pierre
Abstract excerpt
In 1971, Tomasz and Zanati discovered that competent pneumococci have a tendency to form aggregates when pelleted by centrifugation and resuspended in 0.01 N HCl by brief vortexing. Interestingly, no clumping was observed with parallel cultures of non-competent cells treated in the same way. We set out to elucidate the mechanism behind this striking phenomenon, and were able to show that it depends on...
Topics
- Adhesins, Bacterial
- Bacterial Proteins
- DNA
- Genes, Bacterial
- Mutation
- N-Acetylmuramoyl-L-alanine Amidase
- Peptides
- Streptococcus pneumoniae
- Transformation, Bacterial