The next 5 comprehension questions are referring to the following text:
Mycoplasma genitalium is a sexually transmitted pathogen which was first discovered in 1980 in the urinary tracts of two men with symptomatic non-gonococcal urethritis (NGU). The bacterium belongs to the class Mollicutes and is a flask- shaped pathogen. M. genitalium is thought to be the smallest prokaryote currently known that is capable of self-replication. Surface lipid-associated membrane proteins, abbreviated as LAMPs, bind to the surface molecules of the host’s vascular endothelial cells using Toll-Like Receptors (TLRs). This adhesion causes those cells to produce cytokines, resulting in an inflammatory response.
The reduced genome is made up of 580 kb and has merely 482 protein-coding genes; as such, it was one of the first bacteria whose genome was fully sequenced and the first genome that was chemically synthesized. It has an organelle on the tip of the terminal structure containing an adhesion molecule, also called the MgPa adhesion protein or P140, which is used to enter and infect a cell. The MgPa adhesion gene has a number of homologous repetitive DNA elements which help to target this gene. When the polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based detection assays targetting M. genitalium were introduced in the early 1990s, the impact of M. genitalium as a pathogen could begin to be investigated.
M. genitalium is very often asymptomatic and thus goes undetected. It colonizes the reproductive tracts of both men and women and has been shown to be particularly adept at eluding the host’s immune responses, possibly through intracellular localization and the recombinational variation found in genes responsible for encoding the surface-exposed antigens. This results in long-term infections that have proven resistant to single-dose azithromycin. Indeed, short-term macrolide antibiotic treatments such as this may even cause mutations in the 23s rRNA gene, resulting in drug resistance.
LAMPs are
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