Isolation and Toxigenic Characteristics of a Tetrodotoxin Producing Bacteria

Tetrodotoxin (TTX) is a kind of neurotoxin with great scientific research and medicinal value. Studies have confirmed that microorganism is one of the important sources of TTX. However, the specific biosynthetic and regulatory pathway of TTX production by microorganisms are still unclear. In this paper, out of twelve symbiotic bacteria screened from the wild puffer fish (Fugu rubripes) collected from coastal sea area of Ningbo (Zhejiang, China), a strain named He-1 isolated from the liver of puffer fish was found can produce TTX. It was identified as Bacillus cereus based on physiological, biochemical characteristics and 16S rDNA gene analysis. However, the strain He-2, which is the subculture strain of He-1, cannot produce TTX under the normal culture condition. Further study showed that by adding the metabolite of the He-1, the ability of TTX producing of He-2 could be restored. A peptide compound was obtained by separating and purifying of the metabolites from strain He-1, which could induce the TTX production of strain He-2. This work will provide a new way for further revealing the anabolic pathway of TTX.

Balon Balığı (Fugu rubripes)’nda Katalaz Geninin Biyoinformatik Analizleri

In this study, bioinformatics analysis of fugu (Fugu rubripes) catalase (cat) gene was performed. Molecular biology science is developing rapidly in parallel with the increasing importance of bioinformatics, thanks to the developed techniques in recent years. In this bioinformatics-based study wich enables the effective identification and characterization of genes in living organisms using online genome databases and statistics and storage, organization and sharing of the ever-increasing genetic data we designed the conserved gene synteny and gene structure and detected the identiy-similarity ratios between fugu and the other telosts and tetrapods. NCBI-GeneBank, EMBL, ENSEML and UNIPROT databases have been used for all these bioinformatics studies. Bioedit and Mega programs were used to perform the analysis and evaluate the data obtained from all these databases. In silico analysis such as the identification and characterization of fugu cat gene, exons-introns organization, phylogenetic tree and gene synteny were completed in this study and presented with tables and figures.