A novel gene R049 identified in uropathogenic Escherichia coli provides partial protection in mice from colonization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC) is the most common causative organism of human urinary tract infection (UTI). Several UPEC virulence factors have been identified, but more are yet to be found. We previously identified a novel 789-bp-long DNA fragment (named R049) in UPEC strain 132 using a suppressive subtractive hybridization technique. In the present study, we used genome walking to elongate the sequence of this fragment to obtain the whole gene sequence and examined the role of this gene product in generating protective immunity. Through bioinformatic analysis, we predicted that this gene is a 1311-bp open reading frame (ORF), which we designated ORF R049 (GenBank accession No.: EF488001). We further constructed a prokaryotic expression system to express full recombinant R049 protein and isolated and purified the protein through IPTG induction and nickel affinity chromatography. Using mouse immunosera generated by the purified protein, we confirmed the natural expression and outer membrane localization of the protein in wild-type strain UPEC132 by Western blotting. To test the potential of this protein as a vaccine candidate, we immunized mice with the recombinant protein before challenging them with UPEC132 through the urinary tract. The results showed significantly reduced bacterial colonization in the urine and kidneys of the immunization group compared with the control group. However, the degree of renal pathological damage was not significantly improved in the immunized mice. Our study has identified a novel gene of UPEC which can generate protective immunity against UTI. This novel gene provides a promising new vaccine candidate.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".