For a summary of the sequence data obtained from the Ftp library, see Additional file 1 Table S1, which shows that several

gene fragments encoding polypeptides of known staphylococcal adhesins such as IgG-binding proteins Protein A and Sbi, fibronectin-binding protein A (FnBPA), clumping factors A and B, elastin-binding protein EbpS, extracellular matrix (ECM) -binding proteins Ebh and Emp, the SD-rich fibrinogen-binding protein as well as enolase [3, 13, 31] were present in the library. Figure 2 Distribution of DNA fragments of the Flag-tag positive library clones on the S. aureus chromosome. The height of the selleck chemicals bars represents the density of matches in windows of 4 kbp for the first sequence batch obtained with primer 017F (innermost circle) and the second sequence batch obtained using primer 071R (middle circle). The size of the find more chromosome is 2.82 Mbp (outermost circle); coordinates of the chromosome are indicated in Mbp. Nucleotide sequencing of the Ftp clones also showed that

three types of inserts existed (examples are presented in Table 1). In the optimal cases, which represented 31% of the Ftp library, the clones carried only one staphylococcal gene or gene fragment which was in the same reading frame as the FliC fragment, added to the construct to facilitate extracellular secretion, and the FLAG-tag. This type of constructs was exemplified by clones named ΔNarG, ΔFnBPA, ΔEbh and ΔCoa. In another case, the staphylococcal gene was in the same reading frame only with the FLAG-tag rendering a gene product without an N-terminal FliC sequence. In the third type of clones several staphylococcal ORFs were identified in the cloned DNA fragment; e.g. two in the clones named ΔPurK, ΔSCOR, ΔUsp and ΔIspD or three in the clone named ΔPBP, although only the distal gene product carried the FLAG tag. We hypothesize that the

translation of a FLAG-tag positive gene product in the later two cases, which Cytidine deaminase represented 69% of the library clones, proceeds from the staphylococcal ribosomal binding site (RBS) detected in the 5′ untranslated region (5′UTR) of the ORF closest to the FLAG-tag encoding sequence. Hence, the expressed product would be encoded by the last gene fragment of the cloned DNA sequence, would not carry the N-terminal FliC sequence, but would be FLAG-tag positive. Phage display results obtained by Rosander and coworkers [18] as well as our results from sequencing and Western blot analysis (Figure 3A) of selected library clones support the hypothesis of translation of the FLAG-positive gene products from a staphylococcal RBS in E. coli.