Lecture 4 Flashcards
What types of surfaces do bacteria need to be able to adhere to?
Abiotic surfaces
Host Tissue
Describe the membrane of a gram positive bacterium
A cytoplasmic membrane is topped with a thick layer of peptidoglycan
Describe the membrane of a gram negative bacteria
A cytoplasmic membrane topped with a thin layer of peptidoglycan (these two are the periplasm) and then the outer membrane, an 8nm thick membrane with polysaccharides and lipopolysaccharides sticking out into extracellular space
Name and describe the main adhesion molecule for S. aureus
SasG - a cell wall attached adhesin
~92nm long and very rigid fibrils
How was SasG shown to be important?
Bacterial count per cell 100 nasal swab cells
Use of tetracycline, an inducer for SasG, caused more cells to be attached.
Shown that other adhesins used; had attachment when had no SasG expression
Name and describe the main adhesion molecule in V. cholera
GlcNac binding protein A
Multidomain protein
Can bind chitin (for section of life cycle in the sea) and mucin (in host)
How was the GbpA gene found?
Random mutagenesis screen found loss of a gene which decreased attachment HT29 cells.
Complement with vector carrying his-tagged version of this gene restored attachment.
What is a his-tag?
Why is it useful?
What are the assumptions when using it?
Histidine tag - 6 repeats of histidine tag on C-terminus allows for protein purification on nickel column for affintity chromatography. Assumes the histidine tag doesn’t affect the function of the protein.
How was the binding of cholera on chitin shown to be dependent on GbpA?
Binding of GFP expressing cholera to chitin beads almost completely knocked out in ΔgpbA strain. Ability to bind not fully restored by complementing with gbpA-his vector
What is one possible drawback of flourescence based assays?
Many things have natural flourescent
How was it shown that GpbA also binds to GlcNac?
Which binding is stronger?
Same experiment using beeda coated in GlcNac
Binding to GlcNac is stonger - increasing soluble GlcNac in solution causes less binding to chitin beads
Is GbpA important for pathogenicity?
Loss of GbpA= lower competetiveness index than wild type- which is resotred by plasmid complementation.
Immune serum raised against GbpA and given to mice. Mice given the serum has higher survival percentage than non-treated mice.
What other role has GbpA been shown to play?
Stimulation of mucin production in host
What type of adhesion molecule are mostly commonly seen on gram -ve bacteria?
Fimbriae (aka pili)
Which three fimbriae are the focus?
Type 1 fimbriae - encoded by the fim operon
PAP - encoded by the pap operon
Curli