The Clostnet conference was the final conclusion for the three-year “Clostnet” international research collaboration funded by the European Union’s 7th framework program. The project was coordinated by the University of Nottingham. The participants of the project included research groups from several EU countries working with pathogenic or industrially significant bacteria of the genus Clostridium.
DVM Elias Dahlsten’s poster “Role of Two-Component System CBO0365/CBO0366 in Cold Stress of Clostridium botulinum ATCC 3502” received the “Best Poster” award at the conference. The research was conducted under Professor Hannu Korkeala’s supervision; the authors of the poster were DVM Elias Dahlsten, Prof. Miia Lindström, M.Sc. Zhen Zhang, D.Sc. (Tech.) Panu Somervuo and Prof. Hannu Korkeala.
In a study previously published by the authors in “Applied and Environmental Microbiology”, a role for the two-component system CBO0365/CBO0366 in cold tolerance of Clostridium botulinum was shown. The research presented in the poster was a continuation to this study. In this work, the genes under regulation of the aforementioned two-component system were identified by comparing the expression levels of all genes between the wild type, and a mutant strain in which the regulatory component of the system was inactivated, with DNA microarray experiments. Additionally, several genes and associated metabolic routes, found to be significantly differentially expressed between the mutant and wild type strains in the microarray experiments, were shown to play a role in cold tolerance of C. botulinum. The results of the study will be published shortly in an international peer-reviewed journal.
The research was carried out at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Microbial Food Safety Research and supported by the Academy of Finland, the Finnish Graduate School on Applied Bioscience, and the Walter Ehrström Foundation.