From nose to lung: the regulation behind Streptococcus pneumoniae virulence factors - PubMed (original) (raw)

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From nose to lung: the regulation behind Streptococcus pneumoniae virulence factors

David L Hava et al. Mol Microbiol. 2003 Nov.

Abstract

Streptococcus pneumoniae probably possesses a redundant set of factors required for colonization of the nasopharynx and invasive disease, because of its strict relationship with its human host and relatively small genome size (approximately 2.1 Mb). Nevertheless, transcriptional regulation of genes encoding factors required for in vivo growth is predicted to be important on two fronts: in the transition from carriage to invasive disease and within different microniches of the nasopharynx. The importance of both serotype-specific and host tissue-specific virulence factors during infection and disease has been highlighted by the recent identification of novel virulence factors in this organism coupled with the release of complete genome sequences from two strains. These studies add to the foundation of knowledge of classical S. pneumoniae virulence factors such as polysaccharide capsule and pneumolysin, which have well-documented roles in pathogenesis.

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Figures

Fig. 1

Fig. 1

Schematic depiction of most of the known S. pneumoniae transcriptional regulators involved in virulence. Transcriptional regulators with demonstrated roles in one or more infection models are shown with known (solid lines) or predicted (dashed lines) targets of regulation. Two-component signal transduction pairs are indicated in red and cytoplasmic regulators in blue. Two known quorum sensing peptides, ComC and BlpC, are shown and the presence of allelic variants of each is indicated by different colours. Each of the targets of regulation shown are mentioned in the text with the exception of pst, which includes genes involved in phosphate transport (Novak et al., 1999).

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