微生物学技术

Protozoa are natural reservoirs of the environmental bacterium Legionella pneumophila. Upon inhalation of Legionella-laden aerosols, the amoeba-resistant bacteria replicate within human alveolar macrophages causing the severe pneumonia “Legionnaires’ disease.” ...

Much of our knowledge of molecular cellular functions is based on studies with a few number of model organisms that were established during the last 50 years. The social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum is one such model, and has been particularly useful for the study of cell motility, chemotaxis, ...

The complete genomes of Dictyostelium discoideum, Dictyostelium purpureum, Polysphondylium pallidum and Dictyostelium fasciculatum have been sequenced. The proteins predicted to be encoded by the genes in each species have been compared to each other as well as to the complete com ...

dictyBase (http://dictybase.org), the model organism database for Dictyostelium discoideum, includes the complete genome sequence and expression data for this organism. Relevant literature is integrated into the database, and gene models and functional annotation are manu ...

Dictyostelium discoideum is a commonly used model organism for the study of biological processes such as chemotaxis, cell communication, and development. While these studies primarily focus on a single clone, recent work has revealed a host of questions that can only be answered from studi ...

The use of fluorescent reporters and the development of new imaging technologies have revolutionized studies in cell biology. During recent years the number of fluorescent proteins offering the ability to visualize the distribution of proteins, organelles, and cells has increased ...

High-throughput sequencing methods have become invaluable for detection and analysis of small RNAs. The results are millions of sequences that need to be carefully analyzed by computational methods and preferentially verified by different experimental techniques. Here we des ...

Transcriptional profiling methods have been utilized in the analysis of various biological processes in Dictyostelium. Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing have increased the resolution and the dynamic range of transcriptional profiling. Here we describe the uti ...

Micrococcal nuclease (MNase) is an endonuclease that cleaves native DNA at high frequency, but is blocked in chromatin by sites of intimate DNA–protein interaction, including nucleosomal regions. Protection from MNase cleavage has often been used to map transcription factor bindi ...

The increasing emergence of drug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis poses significant threat to the treatment of tuberculosis (TB). Conventional drug susceptibility testing is time-consuming and takes several weeks because of the slow growth rate of M. tuberculosis and the ...

DNA-based typing has contributed to the understanding of M. tuberculosis epidemiology and evolution. IS6110 RFLP was the first method described and has been used in many epidemiologic investigations. Technological difficulties have hampered the widespread establishment of t ...

DNA fingerprinting techniques are based on genome variation and form the basis of molecular epidemiology studies of tuberculosis. A number of markers are in use for the molecular differentiation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates by DNA fingerprinting. One of these markers is the ...

The identification of essential genes is of major importance to mycobacterial research, and a number of essential genes have been identified in mycobacteria, however confirming essentiality is not straightforward, as deletion of essential genes results in a lethal phenotype. In this ...

Conditional expression–specialized transduction essentiality test (CESTET) is a genetic tool used to determine essentiality of individual genes in Mycobacterium smegmatis. CESTET combines specialized transduction, a highly efficient gene knockout method, with the ut ...

Mycobacteria produce an effective permeability layer that consists of a mycolic acid–containing cell wall. This protection confers a natural resistance to many chemical agents and results in a low permeability toward both hydrophilic and lipophilic agents. The permeability of ce ...

Two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DE) in combination with mass spectrometry (MS) is the classic proteomics approach used to monitor the dynamics of protein abundance and posttranslational modifications in biological systems. In this chapter, we provide detailed protoc ...

DNA microarray technology represents an extremely powerful tool to understand the biology of Myobacterium tuberculosis and its interaction with the host. It opens up the possibility of monitoring the expression level of thousands of genes in parallel, thus the ability to test the effect on ...

The development of microarray technology has allowed the genomes of mycobacteria to be directly compared to identify DNA regions that differ between strains due to deletion, insertion, or sequence divergence. The use of microarrays in comparative genomics has proved to be a valuable tool ...

A procedure for metabolic labeling of all cellular lipids starting with a culture of mycobacteria is described in this chapter using either a pulse-chase or a simple labeling experimental design. Three fractions are produced for subsequent lipid analysis: (1) the culture filtrate; (2) a rea ...

There is massive gene replication predicted for the activation of fatty acids and their entry into the β-oxidation cycle for fatty acid oxidation. These two steps in fatty acid metabolism are catalyzed by FadD and FadE enzymes with 36 genes predicted for each of these respective activities in Myc ...