Research Abstracts Online
2008 - March 2009
University of Minnesota Twin Cities
College of Veterinary Medicine
Department of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences
PI: Timothy J. Johnson
Genomics-based Approaches Towards Understanding Extraintestinal Escherichia coli Virulence
Infections due to extraintestinal pathogenic Escherichia coli (ExPEC) place a significant burden on the health care industry. ExPEC virulence is extremely complex, involving a variety of traits. Many of these traits are located on pathogenicity-associated islands (PAIs) in the bacterial chromosome or on transmissible plasmids.The aims of this project are to 1) determine the prevalence of virulence-associated traits among different ExPEC sub-populations; 2) understand the evolution of PAIs via comparative genomic analyses; and 3) determine the evolutionary relatedness of these strains via multilocus sequence typing. The goal of these studies is a better understanding of the mechanisms of ExPEC-caused disease.