Western Blotting Against Tagged Virulence Determinants to Study Bacterial Pathogenicity

Abstract

Western blotting is a common approach to detect the presence of a target protein in biological samples or proteins mixture using specific antibodies. This method is also useful to study regulation of virulence determinants by analyzing changes in protein expression between different genetic backgrounds or under varying environmental conditions. To avoid the need to raise specific antibodies for each studied protein, commercial antibody against commonly used peptidic epitopes can be utilized if the right target tagged version is constructed. Here we describe a C-terminal fusion between a protein of interest and the two hemagglutinin A (2HA) tag. The tagged protein is cloned into a low-copy number vector and expressed under its native promoter in Salmonella enterica. Then, the expression of the tagged protein can be analyzed by Western blotting and commercially available anti-2HA antibodies.