Efficient Gene Deletion Method for Listeria monocytogenes

Inactivation or deletion of genes allows for investigation and understanding of gene function. To facilitate markerless gene deletion in Listeria monocytogenes, we developed a new suicide plasmid (pHoss1). pHoss1 contains the pMAD backbone, the secY antisense cassette from pIMAY driven by an inducible Pxyl/tetO promoter, a heat-sensitive origin of replication, four unique restriction sites (SalI, EcoRI, SmaI, and NcoI), and erythromycin resistance gene. We demonstrated that pHoss1 is very efficient for introducing mutations into different L. monocytogenes strains. In this chapter, we include a brief description of pHoss1 and the method used for gene deletion in L. monocytogenes using pHoss1.