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12th International Symposium on Bioluminescence & Chemiluminescence |
Symposium abstracts:
Wiles, Siouxsie1, Kampmann, Beate1, Young, Douglas1
Centre for Molecular Microbiology and Infection, Imperial College School of Medicine, South Kensington Campus, London, SW7 2AZ, UK
Email: siouxsie.wiles@ic.ac.uk
Worldwide, tuberculosis causes nearly 2 million deaths per year. Approximately one-third of the world’s population is thought to be infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a facultative intracellular pathogen which resides within the macrophages of its host. Most countries in the world vaccinate children with the live, attenuated Mycobacterium bovis bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG). However, the vaccine is universally acknowledged as being less than ideal and an inadequate understanding of the mechanisms underlying protective immunity is a major impediment to the development of improved vaccines. Work on mycobacteria is further compromised by the very slow growth rate of these organisms, with doubling-times in excess of 18 hours making it difficult to assess viability by conventional means. Due to these restrictions, we have studied the growth of recombinant BCG in human whole blood using bacterial luminescence (luxAB from the marine bacterium Vibrio harveyi) as an indicator of mycobacterial viability. Results indicate that the developed assay is a rapid, reliable and reproducible means of assessing mycobacterial growth in vitro and differentiates between human subjects on the basis of their individual antimycobacterial activity. Such an assay may be able to detect potential protective responses elicited by vaccine candidates during preliminary immunogenicity trials.
This
is a preprint of an article accepted for publication in Luminescence: Copyright
2001 John
Wiley & Sons, Ltd (Wiley website)