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Title: Comparative Analysis of Clostridium perfringens Bacteriophage

Author
item PLEASANT, DOREA - CLAFLIN UNIVERSITY
item Kuntz, Robin
item Siragusa, Gregory
item Seal, Bruce

Submitted to: American Chemical Society Abstracts
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 9/25/2007
Publication Date: 10/27/2007
Citation: Pleasant, D., Kuntz, R.L., Siragusa, G.R., Seal, B.S. 2007. Comparative Analysis of Clostridium perfringens Bacteriophage. American Chemical Society Abstracts.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Clostridium perfringens are Gram-positive bacteria that are a major bacterial cause of food-borne disease among humans. These anaerobic bacteria are also the presumptive etiologic agent of necrotic enteritis among chickens. Pathogenesis and symptoms of a necrotic enteritis infection among chickens can be determined by the toxins produced by C. perfringens strains type A or C. This problem may increase for the poultry industry and may possibly become a severe issue if antibiotics are withdrawn from animal feeds. Therefore, the potential applications of lytic bacteriophage and/or their lytic enzymes have become extremely interesting in the veterinary, medicine and bioindustry fields. Research for discovery of bacteriophage lytic for C. perfringens should lead to the discovery of new antimicrobial agents such as phage lytic enzymes. In an effort to contribute to the discovery of new antimicrobial agents, we used several techniques to compare four C. perfringens bacterial isolates, Cp13, Cp 26, Cp34 and Cp39, and their specific bacteriophage, Cp phage13-O, Cp phage 26-F, Cp phage 34-O and Cp phage 39-O. The C. perfringens bacteriophages were screened against all test hosts. The bacteriophages showed great specificity for there host with only one phage able to infect and lyse more than a single target strain, Cp phage 39-O. Electron micrographs showed that all of the bacteriophages had similar physical characteristics. A number of protein structural regions were determined to be common to all four C. perfringens bacteriophages as analyzed by proteomics. DNA blot hybridization analysis demonstrated high nucleic acid sequence similarity among the bacteriophage genomes. In the future these genomes will be sequenced to search for regions encoding enzymes lytic for the host bacteria, C. perfringens.