Function of the Bacterial Cytoskeleton in the Pathogenicity of Salmonella

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Salmonella are bacteria of global medical importance and cause a broad range of diseases in humans from gastroenteritis to typhoid fever. Understanding the mechanisms by which salmonella cause disease may help in developing novel drugs and vaccines to combat disease.Salmonella possess an armoury of weapons or virulence factors which enable them to cause disease. However the assembly of these complex macromolecular virulence structures remains to be fully elucidated. It is conceivable that a scaffold or cytoskeleton may be required to provide support and organisation for assembling these structures.The proposal builds upon our unpublished preliminary data on the Salmonella Mre operon which contains seven genes, the first of which mreB encodes a homologue of the cytoskeletal protein actin found in mammalian cells. We have constructed Mre operon mutants and will determine the impact of these mutations on the functionality of important macromolecular virulence factors. We will be studying how the Mre operon encoded proteins function within Salmonella, and modulate their interactions with host tissues. This approach will provide important insights in the contribution of the bacterial cytoskeleton to virulence.