Hi all, this may be a naive question. I saw papers using cholera toxin to infect mice to induce antigen specific responses by T cells. Does anybody know if cholera toxin is dangerous or not? Does it infect human? How do I handle it?

 

It's available from sigma, so I assume it shouldn't be dangerous. But just want to make sure.

 

Thanks!!

Infections are typically mediated by pathogens or parasites (including viruses). The cholera toxin is just a protein complex and does not do infection. The correct question would rather be if it has health issues. The answer is, depends on form, dose and uptake mechanism. Often, only the B subunit is sold (rather than the complete complex, which is kind of hard to maintain) which is not really toxic.

 

But it is a weird assumption that products sold by sigma are not dangerous. The majority of the stuff I get for routine analyses is quite deadly when consumed.

Infections are typically mediated by pathogens or parasites (including viruses). The cholera toxin is just a protein complex and does not do infection. The correct question would rather be if it has health issues. The answer is, depends on form, dose and uptake mechanism. Often, only the B subunit is sold (rather than the complete complex, which is kind of hard to maintain) which is not really toxic.

 

But it is a weird assumption that products sold by sigma are not dangerous. The majority of the stuff I get for routine analyses is quite deadly when consumed.

Thank you so for the answer!

You need to get into the habit of looking at Material Safety Data Sheets.

Some of them are a bit over-cautious, but they give an indication of the hazards involved in working with a material.

I worked with cholera toxin many years ago. There are actually two subunits encoded by two separate genes. One subunit....the A subunit if I remember correctly, is the actual toxin. The B subunit on the other hand is actually the part that binds to the receptor and facilitates the endocytosis of the complex. You can use the B subunit to induce immune responses without the presence of the A subunit. When I worked with it, we were expressing the B subunit in corn and feeding it to mice to see if we could develop edible vaccines in this way.

 

Its probable that they are using only the B subunit in these experiments to induce a response without the actual toxicity of the A subunit.

Edited July 29, 201411 yr by chadn737

Yupp, that is what is typically done.

I worked with cholera toxin many years ago. There are actually two subunits encoded by two separate genes. One subunit....the A subunit if I remember correctly, is the actual toxin. The B subunit on the other hand is actually the part that binds to the receptor and facilitates the endocytosis of the complex. You can use the B subunit to induce immune responses without the presence of the A subunit. When I worked with it, we were expressing the B subunit in corn and feeding it to mice to see if we could develop edible vaccines in this way.

 

Its probable that they are using only the B subunit in these experiments to induce a response without the actual toxicity of the A subunit.

Thank you so much for the answer. I really appreciate it! So it should be OK for me to do this model in normal SPF facilities, right? It shouldn't spread to other mouse colonies, is that correct?

 

Many thanks!!

I actually bought the whole cholera toxin, including subunit A and B. Do I need to do the infection in a special containment facility?