Characterization of recombinant B. abortus strain RB51SOD toward understanding the uncorrelated innate and adaptive immune responses induced by RB51SOD compared to its parent vaccine strain RB51

Brucella abortus is a Gram-negative, facultative intracellular pathogen for several mammals, including humans. Live attenuated B. abortus strain RB51 is currently the official vaccine used against bovine brucellosis in the United States and several other countries. Overexpression of protective B. abortus antigen Cu/Zn superoxide dismutase (SOD) in a recombinant strain of RB51 (strain RB51SOD) significantly increases its vaccine efficacy against virulent B. abortus challenge in a mouse model. An attempt has been made to better understand the mechanism of the enhanced protective immunity of RB51SOD compared to its parent strain RB51. We previously reported that RB51SOD stimulated enhanced Th1 immune response. In this study, we further found that T effector cells derived from RB51SOD-immunized mice exhibited significantly higher cytotoxic T lymphocyte activity than T effector cells derived from RB51-immunized mice against virulent B. abortus-infected target cells. Meanwhile, the macrophage responses to these two strains were also studied. Compared to RB51, RB51SOD cells had a lower survival rate in macrophages and induced lower levels of macrophage apoptosis and necrosis. The decreased survival of RB51SOD cells correlates with the higher sensitivity of RB51SOD, compared to RB51, to the bactericidal action of either Polymyxin B or sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS). Furthermore, a physical damage to the outer membrane of RB51SOD was observed by electron microscopy. Possibly due to the physical damage, overexpressed Cu/Zn SOD in RB51SOD was found to be released into the bacterial cell culture medium. Therefore, the stronger adaptive immunity induced by RB51SOD did not correlate with the low level of innate immunity induced by RB51SOD compared to RB51. This unique and apparently contradictory profile is likely associated with the differences in outer membrane integrity and Cu/Zn SOD release.Peer reviewedVeterinary Health Science

Caspase-2 mediates a Brucella abortus RB51-induced hybrid cell death having features of apoptosis and pyroptosis

Programmed cell death (PCD) can play a crucial role in tuning the immune response to microbial infection. Although PCD can occur in different forms, all are mediated by a family of proteases called caspases. Caspase-2 is the most conserved caspase; however its function in cell death is ill-defined. Previously we demonstrated that live attenuated cattle vaccine strain Brucella abortus RB51 induces caspase-2-mediated PCD of infected macrophages. However, the mechanism of caspase-2-mediated cell death pathway remained unclear. In this study, we found that caspase-2 mediated proinflammatory cell death of RB51-infected macrophages and regulated many genes in different PCD pathways. We show that the activation of proapoptotic caspases-3 and -8 was dependent upon caspase-2. Caspase-2 regulated mitochondrial cytochrome c release and TNFα production, both of which are known to activate caspase-3 and caspase-8, respectively. In addition to TNFα, RB51-induced caspase-1 and IL-1β production was also driven by caspase-2-mediated mitochondrial dysfunction. Interestingly, pore formation, a phenomenon commonly associated with caspase-1-mediated pyroptosis, occurred; however it did not contribute to RB51-induced proinflammatory cell death. Our data suggest that caspase-2 acts as an initiator caspase that mediates a novel RB51-induced hybrid cell death that simulates but differs from typical apoptosis and pyroptosis. The initiator role of the caspase-2-mediated cell death was also conserved in cellular stress-induced cell death of macrophages treated with etoposide, naphthalene, or anti-Fas. Caspase-2 also regulated caspase-3 and -8 activation, as well as cell death in macrophages treated with each of the three reagents. Taken together, our data has demonstrated that caspase-2 can play an important role in mediating a proinflammatory response and a hybrid cell death that demonstrates features of both apoptosis and pyroptosis

Literature Mining and Ontology based Analysis of Host-Brucella Gene-Gene Interaction Network

Brucella is an intracellular bacterium that causes chronic brucellosis in humans and various mammals. The identification of host-Brucella interaction is crucial to understand host immunity against Brucella infection and Brucella pathogenesis against host immune responses. Most of the information about the inter-species interactions between host and Brucella genes is only available in the text of the scientific publications. Many text-mining systems for extracting gene and protein interactions have been proposed. However, only a few of them have been designed by considering the peculiarities of host-pathogen interactions. In this paper, we used a text mining approach for extracting host-Brucella gene-gene interactions from the abstracts of articles in PubMed. The gene-gene interactions here represent the interactions between genes and/or gene products (e.g., proteins). The SciMiner tool, originally designed for detecting mammalian gene/protein names in text, was extended to identify host and Brucella gene/protein names in the abstracts. Next, sentence-level and abstract-level co-occurrence based approaches, as well as sentence-level machine learning based methods, originally designed for extracting intra-species gene interactions, were utilized to extract the interactions among the identified host and Brucella genes. The extracted interactions were manually evaluated. A total of 46 host-Brucella gene interactions were identified and represented as an interaction network. Twenty four of these interactions were identified from sentence-level processing. Twenty two additional interactions were identified when abstract-level processing was performed. The Interaction Network Ontology (INO) was used to represent the identified interaction types at a hierarchical ontology structure. Ontological modeling of specific gene-gene interactions demonstrates that host-pathogen gene-gene interactions occur at experimental conditions which can be ontologically represented. Our results show that the introduced literature mining and ontology-based modeling approach are effective in retrieving and analyzing host-pathogen gene-gene interaction networks