MOLECULAR ANALYSIS OF STAPHYLOCOCCAL TYPE C ENTEROTOXINS

金黄色葡萄球菌是食物中毒的主要原因， 美国的 葡萄球菌食物中毒是一种中毒 与呕吐和腹泻有关。 我们的实验室关注的是 葡萄球菌肠毒素的结构-功能分析， 识别引起症状所必需的功能区域 在胃肠道中。 这项工作的另一个重要方面是 它能让我们区分肠毒性和 超抗原分子区域。 该地区的牵连最强烈 在肠毒性活性中，二硫环周围的区域。 我们 在该区域构建了几个突变，并表明 所得蛋白质在口服给猪尾鼠时是无毒的， 猕猴 我们将在明年继续这项工作，以确定 胃肠道是否能诱导保护性免疫 通过使用这些毒素中的几种作为口服疫苗传播。

Staphylococcus aureus is a major cause of food poisoning in the United States. Staphylococcal food poisoning is an intoxication associated with vomiting and diarrhea. Our lab is concerned with structure-function analysis of staphylococcal enterotoxins, allowing the identification of functional regions necessary to cause symptoms in the gastrointestinal tract. Another important aspect of this work is that it allows us to differentiate between enterotoxic and superantigenic molecular regions. The region implicated most strongly in enterotoxic activity is the area around the disulfide loop. We constructed several mutations in this region and have shown that the resulting proteins are nontoxic when administered orally to pigtailed macaques. We will extend this work during the next year to determine whether protective immunity can be induced in the gastrointestinal tract by using several of these toxins as oral vaccines.