[Nick G]

Hi! My name is Sal­mo­nella en­ter­ica. I am a rod shaped, fla­gel­lated, Gram neg­a­tive mem­ber of the en­ter­obac­te­ri­aceae Fam­ily. My Genus is Sal­mo­nella. I am a fac­ul­ta­tive anaer­o­bic or­gan­ism. I pro­duce ATP through the mixed-acid fer­men­ta­tion of glu­cose. This process pro­duces CO2 and H2 with mul­ti­ple acid end-prod­ucts, such as for­mate, ac­etate­and lac­tate. I nor­mally like to hang out in the in­testines of both hu­mans and an­i­mals. My main method of trans­porta­tion is through chicken eggs and tis­sue as well as the tis­sue of pigs, cat­tle and dairy prod­ucts. Some­times I even like to take a spe­cial trip and tag along with ro­dents or in­sects. I am very path­o­genic caus­ing about 1.3 mil­lion in­fec­tions an­nu­ally and am re­spon­si­ble for ap­prox­i­mately 30% of food borne ill­ness. My sub­species is re­spon­si­ble for Ty­phoid fever which is a world­wide bac­te­r­ial dis­ease. I was fa­mous at one point for the afore­men­tioned dis­ease but since the rise of 20th cen­tury san­i­ta­tion tech­niques and an­tibi­otics the oc­cur­rence of Ty­phoid has dropped dras­ti­cally. I’m a very clever pathogen! I in­vade host cells by se­cret­ing pro­teins and in­ject­ing them into the cell, my pro­teins com­pro­mise the in­tegrity of it by de­stroy­ing the cy­toskele­ton. This causes mem­brane ruf­fling which al­lows me to enter the cell through the plasma mem­brane. Re­cently re­searchers have been using me to treat can­cer in some mouse mod­els. They use me to in­fect the can­cer cells to be able to tar­get them with an im­mune re­sponse.

Re­frences:

http://​www.​ncbi.​nlm.​nih.​gov/​pubmed/​20659291
http://​cancerres.​aac​rjou​rnal​s.​org/​content/​65/​9/​3920.​full.​pdf+html
Text­bookof­bac­te­ri­ol­ogy.net.
Hogg, S. (2005). Es­sen­tial Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy (1st ed.). Wiley. pp. 99–100