Salmonella

Species of Salmonella are a leading cause of foodborne illnesses and cause an infection called salmonellosis. Symptoms of Salmonella infection include: diarrhea, vomiting, and a fever within 8-72 hours of eating the contaminated food. Some people can get infected and won’t need medical treatment; however, for those with weakened immune systems like infants, pregnant women, and older adults, it can be life-threatening. There is no vaccine against Salmonella that is currently in widespread use in either livestock or humans.  Previously, an antigen classifier was constructed by training a support vector machine on a data set of 136 known antigens and 136 non-antigens annotated with 122 features from 19 different protein annotation tools.  The proteome of Salmonella was then annotated for the same features and the antigen classifier used to identify the top 100 potential antigens.  These top 100 antigens represent vaccine candidates that must first be tested in mouse protection assays.  Ten antigens were identified for mouse protection assays that represent clonable targets (transmembrane domains <2) and were expressed during the intracellular phase of Salmonella infection.  Future work will determine if immunization of mice with these predicted antigens can protect them from subsequent pathogen challenge.