Staphylococcus
aureus
is the leading cause of
skin and soft tissue infections. It remains incompletely understood
how skin-resident immune cells respond to invading
S. aureus
and contribute to an effective immune response. Langerhans cells
(LCs), the only professional antigen-presenting cell type in the epidermis,
sense
S. aureus
through their pattern-recognition
receptor langerin, triggering a proinflammatory response. Langerin
recognizes the β-1,4-linked
N
-acetylglucosamine
(β1,4-GlcNAc) but not α-1,4-linked GlcNAc (α1,4-GlcNAc)
modifications, which are added by dedicated glycosyltransferases TarS
and TarM, respectively, on the cell wall glycopolymer wall teichoic
acid (WTA). Recently, an alternative WTA glycosyltransferase, TarP,
was identified, which also modifies WTA with β-GlcNAc but at
the C-3 position (β1,3-GlcNAc) of the WTA ribitol phosphate
(RboP) subunit. Here, we aimed to unravel the impact of β-GlcNAc
linkage position for langerin binding and LC activation. Using genetically
modified
S. aureus
strains, we observed that langerin
similarly recognized bacteria that produce either TarS- or TarP-modified
WTA, yet
tarP
-expressing
S. aureus
induced increased cytokine production and maturation of
in vitro
-generated LCs compared to
tarS
-expressing
S. aureus
. Chemically synthesized WTA
molecules, representative of the different
S. aureus
WTA glycosylation patterns, were used to identify langerin-WTA binding
requirements. We established that β-GlcNAc is sufficient to
confer langerin binding, thereby presenting synthetic WTA molecules
as a novel glycobiology tool for structure-binding studies and for
elucidating
S. aureus
molecular pathogenesis. Overall,
our data suggest that LCs are able to sense all β-GlcNAc-WTA
producing
S. aureus
strains, likely performing an
important role as first responders upon
S. aureus
skin invasion.