L‐fucose influences chemotaxis and biofilm formation in Campylobacter jejuni

Abstract

Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli are zoonotic pathogens once considered asaccharolytic, but are now known to encode pathways for glucose and fucose uptake/metabolism. For C. jejuni, strains with the fuc locus possess a competitive advantage in animal colonization models. We demonstrate that this locus is present in > 50% of genome-sequenced strains and is prevalent in livestock-associated isolates of both species. To better understand how these campylobacters sense nutrient availability, we examined biofilm formation and chemotaxis to fucose. C. jejuni NCTC11168 forms less biofilms in the presence of fucose, although its fucose permease mutant (fucP) shows no change. In a newly developed chemotaxis assay, both wild-type and the fucP mutant are chemotactic towards fucose. C. jejuni 81-176 naturally lacks the fuc locus and is unable to swim towards fucose. Transfer of the NCTC11168 locus into 81-176 activated fucose uptake and chemotaxis. Fucose chemotaxis also correlated with possession of the pathway for C. jejuni RM1221 (fuc+) and 81116 (fuc-). Systematic mutation of the NCTC11168 locus revealed that Cj0485 is necessary for fucose metabolism and chemotaxis. This study suggests that components for fucose chemotaxis are encoded within the fuc locus, but downstream signals only in fuc + strains, are involved in coordinating fucose availability with biofilm development.

Glucose Metabolism via the Entner-Doudoroff Pathway in Campylobacter: A Rare Trait that Enhances Survival and Promotes Biofilm Formation in Some Isolates

“…Host signals also play a role; a recent study showed that C. jejuni 11168 can produce a glucan biofilm composed of α-dextran as a specific response to the presence of host pancreatic amylase (Jowiya et al, 2015). In contrast to the clear stimulatory effect of glucose on biofilm formation we found here, the only other sugar known to be metabolized by campylobacters, L -fucose, was very recently shown to reduce biofilm formation in the C. jejuni NCTC 11168 strain (Dwivedi et al, 2016). The reduction was dependent on L -fucose transport and metabolism and the authors speculated that L -fucose might be an intestinal signal to maintain cells in a planktonic state.…”

“…The reduction was dependent on L -fucose transport and metabolism and the authors speculated that L -fucose might be an intestinal signal to maintain cells in a planktonic state. Taking our data together with the findings of Dwivedi et al (2016) it is now clear that these two related hexose sugars are not only metabolized very differently, but they also play very different roles in modulating the crucial biofilm response of campylobacters.…”

The Campylobacter jejuni Oxidative Stress Regulator RrpB Is Associated with a Genomic Hypervariable Region and Altered Oxidative Stress Resistance

“…To assess the distribution of rrpA and rrpB in C. jejuni and C. coli we utilized a collection of 4,232 Campylobacter genome sequences (3,746 C. jejuni and 486 C. coli ) from public databases (Cody et al, 2013; Brown et al, 2015), which were phylogenetically clustered using FFPry feature frequency profiling (Van Vliet and Kusters, 2015; Dwivedi et al, 2016) and further analyzed for MLST sequence type and clonal complex (Pearson et al, 2015). The vast majority of C. jejuni strains contain rrpA whilst the presence of rrpB is more restricted ( Figure 1 ; Supplementary Table 2 – Sheet 2).…”

“…These genomes were previously used for identification of DNase-genes (Brown et al, 2015), CRISPR repeats and cas genes (Pearson et al, 2015) and the fucose utilization operon (Dwivedi et al, 2016). Genomes included were between 1.5 and 2.0 Mbp and had at least 5 of the 7 MLST alleles identifiable using BLAST.…”

Microbiota-Derived Short-Chain Fatty Acids Modulate Expression of Campylobacter jejuni Determinants Required for Commensalism and Virulence

“…Catabolism of glucose occurs in some Campylobacter coli isolates, but only one subspecies of C. jejuni has been found to produce a system for the uptake and utilization of this carbohydrate (10). A subset of C. jejuni strains possesses a genomic island encoding enzymes for fucose utilization and a chemotaxis receptor for fucose (11–13). Instead, most C. jejuni strains predominantly rely on amino acids and peptides to fuel various metabolic pathways, including the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle and gluconeogenesis for lipo-oligosaccharide and capsular polysaccharide biogenesis (8, 9).…”