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Important Step Towards Salmonella Vaccine Print E-mail
A challenge in efforts to develop a vaccine against salmonella is to detoxify salmonella lipid A while retaining its adjuvant properties for use in live attenuated vaccines for humans. curtissrolandkongNow Qingke Kong of Arizona State University, Tempe, and collaborators show that this toxicity can be reduced by modifying the number of the acyl chains without compromising immunogenicity. "Our work demonstrates that a delta-pagP, delta-msbB mutant, which lacks palmitate and myristate chains on the lipid A, induces lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, while retaining the ability to elicit humoral and mucosal immune responses," says Kong. "This particular combination of mutations may have additional advantages when designing anticancer vaccines. The strains described in our paper, which produce a number of different lipid A structures, will also be useful for studies designed to understand the interactions between lipid A and Toll-like receptors, in particular, Toll-like receptor 4."

(Q. Kong, D. A. Six, Q. Liu, K. L. Roland, C. R. R. Raetz, and R. Curtiss III. 2011. Palmitoylation state impacts induction of innate and acquired immunity by the Salmonella enterica serovar typhimurium msbB mutant. Infect. Immun. 79:5027-5038.)