Scientists have been successfully unravelling the genetic secrets of the E.coli strain which caused death and alarm across Europe earlier this year, a conference was told yesterday.
Ten variants of the strain have been studied and show "a very high" number of genes involved in disease, scientists said.
About 50 deaths have been attributed to the bug and the continent’s market for raw vegetables devastated as efforts to identify the source of infection proved inconclusive.
The latest findings show the bacteria gained the ability to make a poison from a virus. But scientists have also identified the genes causing resistance to antibiotics.
One of the scientists Dr Lisa Crossman, of the Genome Analysis Centre, Norwich, UK, said: "The E. coli O104:H4 outbreak strain has gained the ability to make a toxin from a bacterial virus source which has made it more dangerous,
"Knowing which antibiotic resistance genes are carried by the strain, for example, can provide us with more insight into the source of the outbreak and help us avoid similar outbreaks occurring in the future.
"We have found that the E. coli strain responsible for the outbreak carries a very high number of genes known to be involved in disease. These include genes that influence the bacterium’s ability to attach to surfaces and survival genes that increase tolerance to high acidity, low oxygen, UV light and antibiotics."
She told the conference of the Society for General Microbiology in York, UK, that the work had been done using "crowd-sourcing" techniques to enable scientists around the world to work on the project.
* German doctors reported yesterday how they found out how to treat neurological complications, such as hallucinations, caused by the outbreak.
The technique involved removing IgG antibodies from the body – as they realised the problems were being caused by the body’s own immune system reaction. The doctors used a technique called immunabsorption.
All 12 patients survived and ten recovered completely, Professor Andreas Greinacher, of the Institut für Immunologie und Transfusionsmedizin, Universitätsmedizin, Greifswald, Germany, reported in The Lancet.
Leave a Reply