“…Detailed information on size and position of deletions and insertions in S. gordonii mutants is given in Table 1. Inactivated genes included gtfG, encoding the single glucosyltransferase of S. gordonii Challis (Grahame & Mayer, 1985;Haisman & Jenkinson, 1991;Vacca-Smith et al, 1994;Vickerman et al, 1996), hsa, encoding a sialic acid-binding adhesin (Takahashi et al, 2002), cshA and fbpA, encoding two fibronectin-binding adhesins (McNab & Jenkinson, 1992;McNab et al, 1996;Christie et al, 2002), sspA and sspB, encoding adhesins that bind to salivary glycoproteins, collagen and other oral microorganisms (Jenkinson et al, 1993;Demuth et al, 1996), msrA, which encodes for a methionine sulfoxide reductase believed to be involved in stabilization of bacterial adhesins (Wizemann et al, 1996;Vriesema et al, 2000), and the RPS locus, responsible for the biosynthesis of the cell wall polysaccharide (Xu et al, 2003). Although these S. gordonii surface proteins have been characterized and analyzed for their function in previous studies, including those cited above, no study has been reported, that systematically analyzes many different mutants of the same strain for binding to EMPs.…”