These guidelines represent an application of the World Health Organization European Region\'s manual for the laboratory diagnosis of diphtheria for laboratories in the United Kingdom (UK), but they could be applied to laboratories overseas. The manual was rewritten in response to the re-emergence of diphtheria in eastern Europe and the emergence of other infections caused by Corynebacterium diphtheriae and C. ulcerans in the UK and overseas. The guidelines summarise our current recommendations and procedures for the microbiological diagnosis of infections caused by toxigenic and non-toxigenic isolates of corynebacteria, with particular reference to C. diphtheriae and C. ulcerans.

Relatively limited information about promoter structures in Corynebacterium glutamicum has been available until now. With the aim of isolating and characterizing such transcription initiation signals, random Sau3A fragments of C. glutamicum chromosomal DNA and of the corynebacterial phage phi GA1 were cloned into the promoter probe vector pEKplCm and selected for promoter activity by chloramphenicol resistance of transformed C. glutamicum cells. The nucleotide sequence of ten chromosomal and three phage fragments was determined and the transcriptional start (TS) sites were localized by primer extension analyses. Additionally, the promoters of five previously isolated C. glutamicum genes were cloned and mapped. All of the isolated promoters were also functional in the heterologous host Escherichia coli. A comparative analysis of the newly characterized promoter sequences together with published promoters from C. glutamicum revealed conserved sequences centred about 35 bp (ttGcca) and 10 bp (TA.aaT) upstream of the TS site. The position of these motifs and the motifs themselves are comparable to the -35 and -10 promoter consensus sequences of other Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, indicating that they represent transcription initiation signals in C. glutamicum. However, the C. glutamicum consensus hexamer of the -35 region is much less conserved than in E. coli, Bacillus, Lactobacillus and Streptococcus.