Abstract
Vibrio cholerae is the etiologic agent of the diarrheal disease cholera. In response to specific environmental conditions, this organism expresses several virulence determinants including the cholera toxin (Ctx), a toxin coregulated pilus (Tcp), and accessory colonization factor (Acf; DiRita and Mekalanos,1989; Taylor et al., 1987; Peterson and Mekalanos, 1988). These gene products are part of a regulon under the control of the products of the toxRS locus of V cholerae (Taylor et al., 1987; Peterson and Mekalanos, 1988). ToxR is a transmembrane protein that binds specifically to the promoter for the operon encoding the cholera toxin (ctxAB) and activates transcription from this promoter in Escherichia coli (Miller and Mekalanos, 1985; Millers et al., 1987).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
DiRita, V.J. and Mekalanos, J.J., 1989, Genetic Regulation of Bacterial Virulence, Ann. Rev. Genet. 23:455–482.
Losick, R. and Pero, J., 1981, Cascades of sigma factors. Cell 25:528–584.
Miller, V. L., DiRita, V. J., and Mekalanos, J. J., 1989, Identification of toxS, a regulatory gene whose product enhances ToxR-mediated activation of the cholera toxin promoter. J. Bacteriol. 171:1288–1293.
Miller, V. L., and Mekalanos, J. J., 1984, Synthesis of cholera toxin is positively regulated at the transcriptional level by toxR. Proc. Natl. Acad Sci USA 81:3471–3475.
Miller, V. L., and Mekalanos, J. J., 1988, A novel suicide vector and its use in construction of insertion mutations: osmoregulation of outer membrane proteins and virulence determinants in Vibrio cholera requires toxR. J. Bacteriol. 170:2575–2583.
Miller, V. L., Taylor, R. K., and Mekalanos, J. J., 1987, Cholera toxin transcriptional activator ToxR is a transmembrane DNA binding protein. Cell 48:271–279.
Neidhardt, F.C. and VanBogelen, R.A., 1987, Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium, In: Cellular and Molecular Biology, eds. Neidhart, F.C., Ingraham, J.L., Low, K.B., Magasanik, B., Schaecter, M. and Umbarker, H.E. (American Society for Microbiology, Washington, DC) pp. 1334–1345.
Peterson, K. M., and Mekalanos, J. J., 1988, Characterization of the Vibrio cholerae ToxR regulon: Identification of novel genes involved in intestinal colonization. Infect Immun. 56:2822–2829.
Taylor, R., Shaw, C, Peterson, K., Spears, P. and Mekalanos, J., 1988, Safe, live Vibrio cholerae vaccines? Vaccine 6:151–154.
Taylor, R. K., Miller, V. L., Furlong, D. B., and Mekalanos, J.J., 1987, Use of phoA gene fusions to identify a pilus colonization factor coordinately regulated with cholera toxin. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 84:2833–2837.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1992 Springer-Verlag New York, Inc.
About this paper
Cite this paper
DiRita, V.J., Parsot, C., Jander, G., Mekalanos, J.J. (1992). A Regulatory Cascade Controls Virulence in Vibrio cholerae . In: Hook, M., Switalski, L. (eds) Microbial Adhesion and Invasion. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2924-7_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2924-7_7
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-7721-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-4612-2924-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive