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Infection and Immunity, September 2008, p. 4145-4151, Vol. 76, No. 9
0019-9567/08/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/IAI.00585-08
Copyright © 2008, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

Proteomic Analysis of Vibrio cholerae in Human Stool ^,

Division of Infectious Diseases, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts,¹ Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts,² Harvard Medical School-Partners Healthcare Center for Genetics and Genomics, Cambridge, Massachusetts,³ Department of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts,⁴ Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts,⁵ International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh,⁶ Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts⁷

Received 13 May 2008/ Returned for modification 24 May 2008/ Accepted 20 June 2008

An effective vaccine for Vibrio cholerae is not yet available for use in the developing world, where the burden of cholera disease is highest. Characterizing the proteins that are expressed by V. cholerae in the human host environment may provide insight into the pathogenesis of cholera and assist with the development of an improved vaccine. We analyzed the V. cholerae proteins present in the stools of 32 patients with clinical cholera. The V. cholerae outer membrane porin, OmpU, was identified in all of the human stool samples, and many V. cholerae proteins were repeatedly identified in separate patient samples. The majority of V. cholerae proteins identified in human stool are involved in protein synthesis and energy metabolism. A number of proteins involved in the pathogenesis of cholera, including the A and B subunits of cholera toxin and the toxin-coregulated pilus, were identified in human stool. In a subset of stool specimens, we also assessed which in vivo expressed V. cholerae proteins were recognized uniquely by convalescent-phase as opposed to acute-phase serum from cholera patients. We identified a number of these in vivo expressed proteins as immunogenic during human infection. To our knowledge, this is the first characterization of the proteome of a pathogenic bacteria recovered from a natural host.

Published ahead of print on 30 June 2008.

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Editor: W. A. Petri, Jr.