Type 1 fimbriae of Escherichia coli as carriers of heterologous antigenic sequences.

A strategy has been designed for the construction of recombinant bacterial strains which eventually may become useful as live vaccines and which may also be relevant for the preparation of conventional vaccines. The approach used is the fusion of small antigenic peptide sequences into specific segments of a protein whose location on the bacterial surface ensures that the recombinant organism is able to present the inserted antigen to the host (animal or human) infected by the bacterium. The chosen surface protein is a naturally occurring polymer of Escherichia coli, viz., type 1 fimbriae. The results obtained show that fusion of such foreign sequences into selected points of the structural protein of the fimbriae results in the production of functionally normal type 1 fimbriae. Furthermore, hybrid fimbriae carrying such small epitope sequences can be recognized by antibodies directed against the foreign parent protein. This observation is an important prerequisite for the eventual design of useful vaccines. The analysis of the fimbrial protein and its potential as a carrier of foreign peptides from hepatitis B surface antigen, foot-and-mouth disease virus and poliovirus indicated that there may be several positions in the protein which may turn out to be relevant for this purpose and be important fusion sites.