Abstract
In 1928, Fred Griffith, a British pathologist was studying the pathogenicity of pneumococcal infections in mice that also causes pneumonia in humans. Based on the disease response, pneumococcal strains could be classified as virulent or disease-causing and avirulent or non-pathogenic. He observed that the virulent strains of the causative organism, Pneumococcus (Streptococcus) pneumoniae can be easily distinguished from the avirulent ones by the fact that they produced smooth glistening colonies on agar surfaces and thus were referred to as S strains. Several such S strains could be identified based on a polysaccharide capsule that carries antigenic properties. Such strains were labeled as SI, SII, SIII, etc., basically differing in the composition of their capsular polysaccharides, and thus, eliciting different antigenic responses.
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Srivastava, S. (2013). Transformation. In: Genetics of Bacteria. Springer, India. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1090-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1090-0_4
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