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<li>To establish a working group consisting of all contributing parties.</li>
<li>To select a panel, comprising up to 100 strains from each partner institute, of zoonotic Salmonella and E. coli with relevance to human infection will be selected.</li>
<li>To select from the literature 10 established virulence determinants, as markers of pathogenicity known to be associated with disease in humans and or animals, and establish their presence by PCR in the panel of isolates.</li>
<li>To develop an electronic database of results To perform microarrays analysis on a selected subset of the panel of Salmonella and E. coli strains.</li>
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A multiple-layered approach has been adopted in which partners select isolates for investigation of the presence or absence of 10 virulence-associated genes using PCR-based screening strategy. At an initial meeting the criteria selection were established for the VTEC and Salmonella isolates to be included and the PCR virulence targets were also agreed. Target and primer sequence tables have been disseminated to partners via the private website. In addition control DNA has been shipped to partners upon request. Virulence-related data has been generated on over 1000 strains from throughout Europe on the PCR profiles of the selected VTEC and Salmonella isolates. A database for all data generated has been constructed in an Excel format for distribution to the partners. This data is now being collated. On the basis of these results, isolates for further investigation using DNA arrays will be selected and tested.
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