Hernández Sergio, Gómez Antonio, Cedano Juan, Querol Enrique
Departament de Bioquímica i Biologia Molecular, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain.
Curr Microbiol. 2009 Oct;59(4):451-6. doi: 10.1007/s00284-009-9459-y. Epub 2009 Jul 28.
The advent of genomics should have facilitated the identification of microbial virulence factors, a key objective for vaccine design. When the bacterial pathogen infects the host it expresses a set of genes, a number of them being virulence factors. Among the genes identified by techniques as microarrays, in vivo expression technology, signature-tagged mutagenesis and differential fluorescence induction there are many related to cellular stress, basal metabolism, etc., which cannot be directly involved in virulence, or at least cannot be considered useful candidates to be deleted for designing a live attenuated vaccine. Among the genes disclosed by these methodologies there are a number of hypothetical or unknown proteins. As they can hide some true virulence factors, we have reannotated all of these hypothetical proteins from several respiratory pathogens by a careful and in-depth analysis of each one. Although some of the re-annotations match with functions that can be related to microbial virulence, the identification of virulence factors remains difficult.
基因组学的出现本应有助于鉴定微生物毒力因子，这是疫苗设计的一个关键目标。当细菌病原体感染宿主时，它会表达一组基因，其中一些是毒力因子。在通过微阵列、体内表达技术、签名标签诱变和差异荧光诱导等技术鉴定出的基因中，有许多与细胞应激、基础代谢等有关，这些基因不能直接参与毒力作用，或者至少不能被认为是设计减毒活疫苗时可删除的有用候选基因。在这些方法所揭示的基因中，有许多是假设的或未知的蛋白质。由于它们可能隐藏一些真正的毒力因子，我们通过对几种呼吸道病原体的每一种假设蛋白质进行仔细深入的分析，对所有这些假设蛋白质进行了重新注释。尽管一些重新注释与可能与微生物毒力相关的功能相匹配，但毒力因子的鉴定仍然困难。
