• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Bacteria manipulated to produce vaccines

Posted on: Tuesday, 24 February 2009, 10:55 CST

A U.S.-led international team of scientists has successfully manipulated bacteria to grow mutant sugar molecules that can be used against them in vaccines.

Ohio State University Professor Peng George Wang, who led the research, says the achievement means such vaccines, if proven safe, could be developed more quickly, easily and cheaply than many currently available vaccines used to prevent bacterial illnesses.

Currently, most bacterial vaccines are created with polysaccharides, or long strings of sugars found on the surface of bacterial cells, the scientists said. The most common way to develop such vaccines is to remove the sugars from the cell surface and link them to proteins to give them more power to kill bacteria. The researchers said their new technique makes a small alteration to the sugar structure and produced the polysaccharide by simple fermentation.

We are showing for the first time that you don't have to use complicated chemical reactions to make the alteration to the polysaccharide, said Wang. All we need to do is ferment the bacteria and then the polysaccharides that grow on the surface of the cell already incorporate the modification.

The research that included scientists from the University of California-Davis; the National Research Council of Canada; and China's Institute for Biological Sciences, Shandong University and Nankai University appears in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: United Press International

More News in this Category