Construction and expression of recombinant plasmids encoding type 1 fimbriae of a urinary Klebsiella pneumoniae isolate.

The type 1 fimbriae of Klebsiella pneumoniae have been implicated as important virulence factors in mediating Klebsiella urinary infections. The chromosomally encoded fimbrial genes were cloned by a cosmid cloning technique. Further subcloning was performed with the cloning vehicles pBR322 and pACYC184, and a recombinant plasmid containing the fimbrial genes was constructed. After transformation by this plasmid, both Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium were shown to express fimbriae which reacted with Klebsiella fimbrial antiserum. The approximate location of the relevant genes on the chimeric plasmid was determined by insertion of the transposable element Tn5. Hemagglutination-negative phenotypes were used to estimate the minimum size of the DNA fragment necessary to encode fimbrial biosynthesis and expression. The size of the coding region of this fragment was found to be 5.5 kilobase pairs.