Achievement

IGERT Fellow Michael Norris developed and tested new strategies for genetic manipulation and targeted mutagenesis in Burkholderia pseudomallei and Burkholderia mallei. The strategies developed were used to engineer auxotrophic mutants that have severely attenuated growth characteristics and may be used as vaccine strains. These methodologies will assist the scientific community as a whole in drug discovery, vaccine development, and pathogenesis research. The paper reporting on this research entitled Glyphosate resistance as a novel non-antibiotic selectable marker: Targeted mutagenesis of the Burkholderia pseudomallei asd and dapB genes, has been submitted to Applied and Environmental Microbiology