The Student Printz

Issue date: 11/20/07 Section: News

Mohamed Elasri [Click to enlarge]

A Southern Miss biological science professor and student have developed an online database that records collected data on genes related to staph infection.

The staphylococcus aureus microarray meta-database, known as SAMMD, has been developed to aid the search for a vaccine to combat the extremely destructive and aggressive methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, also known as MRSA.
SAMMD was launched this semester by associate professor Mohamed Elasri.

"This is a great research tool that saves tons of time," Elasri said about the database. "SAMMD allows researchers to do genetic analyses that were previously impossible to do."

There are currently more than 400 SAMMD users from 23 countries who participate in the database, and those numbers are increasing daily.

"We've added this bioinformatics tool, specific to staph infection, that allows researchers worldwide to be able to take their favorite gene and look up all the information there is about it," Elasri said. "This database is unique. Other databases only tell you about the papers published on staph, but you cannot cross-reference them with other publications. With SAMMD, you can enter your favorite gene name and this will find all the information extracted from these published papers for you."

Staph has recently been widely publicized in the media due to the increase of the horrific MRSA strain that has surfaced in several public institutions, such as schools. According to cnn.com, the "superbug" strain of bacteria was responsible for the deaths of at least two students in Virginia and New York last month.

The search for and study of staph-related genes is extremely important to the effort to find a vaccine that can protect against the new strains of staph.

"All of the research everyone is doing is to find that target gene, mutate it and look for its affect among the rest of the genes," said Vijayaraj Nagarajan, a doctoral student who assisted in the development of the SAMMD.

Nagarajan said the database concentrates on looking for papers on staphylococcus microarray, which is a gene chip technology used to tag a staph gene for study.

Elasri said that SAMMD could greatly reduce a significant amount of time that it takes find information about the staph genes. The database currently has a gene list of about 12, 236 and it is constantly increasing.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, MRSA infections are estimated to occur in an estimated 94,000 people each year with about 19,000 resulting deaths.

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