Abstract
Campylobacter enterocolitis may lead to post-infection irritable bowel syndrome (PI-IBS) and while some C. jejuni strains are more likely than others to cause human disease, genomic and virulence characteristics promoting PI-IBS development remain uncharacterized. We combined pangenome-wide association studies and phenotypic assays to compare C. jejuni isolates from patients who developed PI-IBS with those who did not. We show that variation in bacterial stress response (Cj0145_phoX), adhesion protein (Cj0628_CapA), and core biosynthetic pathway genes (biotin: Cj0308_bioD; purine: Cj0514_purQ; isoprenoid: Cj0894c_ispH) were associated with PI-IBS development. In vitro assays demonstrated greater adhesion, invasion, IL-8 and TNFα secretion on colonocytes with PI-IBS compared to PI-no-IBS strains. A risk-score for PI-IBS development was generated using 22 genomic markers, four of which were from Cj1631c, a putative heme oxidase gene linked to virulence. Our finding that specific Campylobacter genotypes confer greater in vitro virulence and increased risk of PI-IBS has potential to improve understanding of the complex host-pathogen interactions underlying this condition
Original language | English |
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Article number | 1015 |
Journal | Communications Biology |
Volume | 4 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 30 Aug 2021 |
Funding
The study was funded by NIDDK K23 DK103911, R03 120745, and Department of Medicine K2R Program Award to M.G. Authors B.P., S.C.B. and S.K.S. are supported by the Medical Research Council (MRC) grant MR/L015080/1. C.T.P is supported by USDA CRIS Project 2030-42000-055-00D. Authors acknowledge Ms. Lori Anderson for administrative support.