Abstract

CONTENT ALERTS Receive: RSS Feeds, eTOCs, free email alerts (when new articles cite this article), more» Information about commercial reprint orders: http://jb.asm.org/site/misc/reprints.xhtml To subscribe to to another ASM Journal go to: http://journals.asm.org/site/subscriptions/ PAULINE A. MILLER, MONROE D. EATON, AND CLARKE T. GRAY Department of Bacteriology and Immunology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts Received for publication November 17, 1958 The ability of a strain of Clostridium tetani to produce toxin is conventionally determined by measuring the Lf titer of the culture supernatant fluid after lysis is completed sometime after the third or fourth day of incubation. Although the flocculation procedure has been repeatedly found useful in the development of a suitable nutritional background for toxin production (Mueller and 1liller, 1954, 1955), it is not appropriate for studying the dynamics of tetanus toxin synthesis. The work of Raynaud (1951) and Raynaud et al. (1955) established the existence of significant quantities of extractable toxin within the bacillary bodies. In order to study the early phases of tetanus toxin synthesis it is necessary to measure the toxin in whole bacilli taken from young cultures before the onset of autolysis. The method reported here involves the injection of washed bacilli into mice under