Coxiella burnetii is an intracellular pathogen responsible for causing Q fever in humans, a disease with varied presentations ranging from a mild flu-like sickness to a debilitating illness that can result in endocarditis. Current treatment is limited to extended periods of antibiotic treatment, with no licenced vaccine available in the UK or US at present. Together, this presents a worrying situation which calls for improved antibiotic therapies and/or the production of a safe, effective vaccine.
Transposon-directed insertion site sequencing (TraDIS) is a negative selection screen that has been applied to identify essential genes of many bacterial species under a range of biologically relevant conditions. Application of this technique to C. burnetii Nine Mile Phase II aims to provide information on C. burnetii genes fundamental for the growth and survival of this pathogen in axenic media, enabling further analysis of essential gene products as prospective drugable targets. To identify essential genes in a high-throughput manner, a transposon library containing > 10,000 unique transposon mutants was created, revealing 512 essential genes. These genes were further analysed in silico to investigate their conservation in the core genome of C. burnetii and their potential drugability.