Genetic Analysis of the Capsular Biosynthetic Locus from All 90 Pneumococcal Serotypes
By Stephen D. Bentley, David M. Aanensen, A. Mavroidi, D. Saunders, E. Rabbinowitsch, M. Collins, Kathy Donohoe, D. Harris, L. Murphy, M. Quail and 7 more. PLoS Genetics, 2006
745 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Several major invasive bacterial pathogens are encapsulated. Expression of a polysaccharide capsule is essential for survival in the blood, and thus for virulence, but also is a target for host antibodies and the basis for effective vaccines. Encapsulated species typically exhibit antigenic variation and express one of a number of immunochemically distinct capsular polysaccharides that define serotypes. We provide the sequences of the capsular biosynthetic genes of all 90 serotypes of Streptococcus pneumoniae and relate these to the known polysaccharide structures and patterns of immunological reactivity of typing sera, thereby providing the most complete understanding of the genetics and origins of bacterial polysaccharide diversity, laying the foundations for molecular serotyping. This is the first time, to our knowledge, that a complete repertoire of capsular biosynthetic genes has been available, enabling a holistic analysis of a bacterial polysaccharide biosynthesis system. Remarkably, the total size of alternative coding DNA at this one locus exceeds 1.8 Mbp, almost equivalent to the entire S. pneumoniae chromosomal complement.
Subfields: Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases, Surgery
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/998bcc9e0b1cb51bb893241425a32ebe0629e55b
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Citations in the corpus
- Pneumococcal Capsules and Their Types: Past, Present, and Future (2015, background): “Except for serotype 1, which uses the initiating glycosyltransferase for teichoic acid synthesis, the next gene in the locus (wchA for most serotypes [30]) encodes the initiating glycosyltransferase.”
- The Pangenome: Diversity, Dynamics and Evolution of Genomes (2020, methodology): “This is exemplified by the production of the capsule (Swartley et al. 1997; Bentley et al. 2006), synthesis of the extracellular polymeric substance The Bacterial Guide to Designing a Diversified Gene Portfolio 57 (EPS) (Harris et al. 2017), and modification of the cell wall (Gerlach et al. 2018).”
- Teichoic acids and related cell-wall glycopolymers in Gram-positive physiology and host interactions (2008, background): “CWGs share many features with capsular polysaccharides, including sugar building blocks, bactoprenol-dependent biosynthesis and structural variabilit”