BCG(Bacille Calmette-Guerin), a live attenuated bovine tubercle bacillus(Mycobacterium bovis) used to immunize against tuberculosis, has been proposes as a multivaccine vehicle. Although BCG offers many advantages as a live recombinant vector
system,
several obstacles impeded the development of this vehicle. Recently we have tried the development of shuttle vectors employing regulatory elements of the major heat shock proteins, gene fusions Escherichia coli lacZ, and expression analysis of
the
cloned genes in M. bovis BCG. For the cloning and gene expression, E. coli-Mycobacteria shuttle plasmid(pMV261) was used. The pMV261 vector can replicate extrachromosomally in mycobacteria. In this study the lacZ gene fragment has been
succesfully
transfered into E. coli and BCG with this shuttle vector, suggesting an ample hope for development of multiple vaccine.
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