The potential for vaccine development against chlamydial infection and disease

Chlamydia trachomatis and Chlamydia pneumoniae appear to share a common imm unobiology with about 80% of their protein coding genes being orthologs. Pr ogress in DNA vaccine development for C. trachomatis suggests that such a s ubunit approach may prove useful for C. pneumoniae. The recent finding that it is possible to select for chlamydiae with targeted mutations in key met abolic genes together with the new knowledge of the chlamydia genome also s uggests that it may be possible to develop live attenuated strains of chlam ydiae for use as vaccine.