Analysis of Orientia tsutsugamushi promoter activity.

ABSTRACT: Orientia tsutsugamushi is an obligate intracellular bacterium that causes scrub typhus, a potentially fatal rickettsiosis, and for which no genetic tools exist. Critical to addressing this technical gap is to identify promoters for driving expression of antibiotic resistance and fluorescence reporter genes in O. tsutsugamushi. Such promoters would need to be highly conserved among strains, expressed throughout infection, and exhibit strong activity. We examined the untranslated regions upstream of O. tsutsugamushi genes encoding outer membrane protein A (ompA), 22-kDa type-specific antigen (tsa22) and tsa56. The bacterium transcribed all three during infection of monocytic, endothelial and epithelial cells. Examination of the upstream noncoding regions revealed putative ribosome binding si

SUBMITTER: Hunt JR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8460164 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature