ABSTRACT
Much of the work on potential chimeric fimbriae vaccines has focused on the common strategy of mserting relatively small peptide sequences, representing antigenic determinants from selected pathogens into the major structural protein of various fimbriae, mostly of Escherichia coli origin. Type 1 fimbriae are heteropolymers consisting of about 98% of a major building element, FimA, in addition to a few percent of three minor proteins, including the actual adhesin molecule. K88 fimbriae from porcine enterotoxigenic E. coli strains are found in at least three antigenic variants, K88ab, K88ac, and K88ad. The initial work on chimeric P fimbriae in E. coli describes the utilization of one of the five hypervariable regions in the Fll serotype subunit protein FelA as the location of insertion of foreign epitopes. A single study has been made investigating the use of the major subunit of type 4 fimbriae as carrier of an foot-and-mouth disease vims epitope.
