Objective
This project intends to establish, through a European consortium, the total nucleotide sequence of the genome of Listeria monocytogenes. The genome size is 3,150 kb.
L. monocytogenes is a facultative intracellular pathogen. It is the etiologic agent of listeriosis, an emerging food-borne infection of increasing Public Health concern and with a great economic impact for the European Food Industry. Listeriosis is the most lethal food-borne infection (mortality 30%). L. monocytogenes has the capacity to cross three critical barriers during infection: the intestinal barrier, the blood-brain barrier and the placental barrier. Clinical manifestations include meningitis and/or encephalitis, abortions and newborn infections and septicemias. This infection is opportunistic and affects mainly pregnant women, babies, the elderly and immunocompromised people including AIDS patients. It also affects apparently healthy individuals and is responsible for outbreaks due to
Listeria-contaminated food products. L. monocytogenes is also of veterinary importance with a main risk for sheep and cows. It is particularly resistant to stress or extreme conditions and its presence must be taken into account, for not only food safety but also environmental safety. In recent years, work on the molecular and cellular basis of the Listeria infection carried out by several laboratories in Europe and the US has very strikingly progressed. L. monocytogenes is now among the best known intracellular bacteria and provide a model system for the molecular and cellular analysis of intracellular parasitism. It also provides a very novel tool to analyse some cellular functions such as actin cytoskeleton rearrangements or signal transduction.
This project will be carried out by a consortium composed of 1) the largest European laboratories working on Listeria and currently involved in a BIOMED 2 project on Listeria molecular and cellular pathogenesis; 2) High through-put sequencers including two experimented scientists who played a critical role in the sequencing and analysis of the genome of the gram positive bacterium B. subtilis.
The objective of this project is to determine in two years the sequence of the Listeria genome. The strain chosen is strain EGD-e, a strain directly derived from the epidemic strain which led to its discovery by EGD Murray in 1926. A shotgun strategy has been decided on the basis of the rapid results obtained by this technique, in the US, in the sequencing of 2 to 4 Megabases bacterial genomes. This European project -the first with such a strategy- will include several phases:
* Construction of small and large fragments libraries and their distribution to the other partners.
* Random sequencing (sequencing of both ends of inserts) until a 6x redundancy is reached.
* Contig assembly. It is planned that 10 months after the start of the project,one member of each group will participate to a workshop, in the InstitutPasteur, for the final assembling and to define the tasks for the next steps the project.
* Contigs joining, mainly performed by PCR with tasks distributed to the partners by the coordinator.
* Double strand DNA sequencing, sequence editing and verification. * Annotation, sequence analysis, publication writing and sequence release.
The determination of the total sequence of the Listeria genome is the first step towards a global knowledge of this gram-positive organism. This information is anticipated to have not only medical and veterinary consequences but also economical and biotechnological impact, e. g. it will provide tools to fight against contamination by this organism and help the design of new therapeutics or new antibiotics against gram positive bacteria, whose incidence has recently dramatically increased after the appraisal of antibiotic resistance.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- medical and health sciences health sciences public health
- medical and health sciences health sciences infectious diseases RNA viruses HIV
- medical and health sciences basic medicine pharmacology and pharmacy pharmaceutical drugs antibiotics
- natural sciences biological sciences genetics genomes
- medical and health sciences basic medicine pharmacology and pharmacy drug resistance antibiotic resistance
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Coordinator
75724 Paris
France
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.