About the project
Entering the 21st century, the world is faced with the threat of avian flu, HIV, tuberculosis and other emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, and is simultaneously being challenged with increasingly virulent and drug-resistant pathogens. The WHO reports infectious disease as the second leading cause of death worldwide, making infectious disease an ever more important field of research.
Organisms in the Bacillus cereus group are Gram-positive spore-forming bacterial that are closely related genetically, and include the opportunistic pathogen B. cereus which is a common food borne human pathogen, B. anthracis, an obligate human pathogen and the cause of the acute lethal disease anthrax, and B. thuringiensis, the world's most frequently used biological pesticide. The three species thus share a common chromosomal genetic background. This project aims to delineate the B. cereus group population structure (a core genome MLST was recently developed by our group and is implemented in PubMLST), and what principally differentiates the B. cereus group bacteria - as well as to characterize novel putative virulence mechanisms and antimicrobial resistance factors in the different species, including multidrug resistance proteins and molecular regulation of biofilm formation.
Sub-project
Funding
The project has been running since 2000, receiving external funding through a Strategic University Programme (2002-2006), a three year channel 3 grant in the FUGE II program from the Norwegian Research Council (2008-201) - and is continued through funding from the Department of Pharmacy (UiO), the Jahre Foundation, and the Nansen Foundation.
Collaborators
Dr. Michel Gohar - Unite Génétique Microbienne et Environnement, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique et de Environment (INRAE), Micalis, Universite Paris-Saclay, France
Dr. Leyla Slamti - Unite Génétique Microbienne et Environnement, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique et de Environment (INRAE), Micalis, Universite Paris-Saclay, France
Dr. Christina Nielsen-LeRoux- Unite Génétique Microbienne et Environnement, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique et de Environment (INRAE), Micalis, Universite Paris-Saclay, France
Professor Monika Ehling-Schultz, University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria
Associate Professor Annika Gillis, Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Dr. Wendy Turner, U.S. Geological Survey and University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA
Professor Ian T. Paulsen, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia