Adherence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa to the cornea is a requisite step in the pathogenesis of bacteria-induced corneal disease. P. aeruginosa is capable of attaching to host epithelial cells by its pili, but there is little information regarding the epithelial receptors of this adhesin in the cornea. Using nitro-cellulose blotting of polyacrylamide gels of solubilized adult mouse corneal epithel...

Neisseria meningitidis can be the causative agent of meningitis or septicemia. This bacterium expresses type IV pili, which mediate a variety of functions, including autoagglutination, twitching motility, biofilm formation, adherence, and DNA uptake during transformation. The secretin PilQ supports type IV pilus extrusion and retraction, but it also requires auxiliary proteins for its assembly ...

CS1 pili are important virulence factors of enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli strains associated with human diarrheal disease. They are the prototype for a family of pili that share extensive sequence similarity among their structural and assembly proteins. Only four linked genes, cooB, cooA, cooC, and cooD, are required to produce CS1 pili in E. coli K-12. To identify amino acids important for ...

UNLABELLED Chaperone-usher pathway (CUP) pili are extracellular organelles produced by Gram-negative bacteria that mediate bacterial pathogenesis. Small-molecule inhibitors of CUP pili, termed pilicides, were rationally designed and shown to inhibit type 1 or P piliation. Here, we show that pilicide ec240 decreased the levels of type 1, P, and S piliation. Transcriptomic and proteomic analyses ...

The Neisseria type IV pilus promotes bacterial adhesion to host cells. The pilus binds CD46, a complement-regulatory glycoprotein present on nucleated human cells (Källström et al., 1997). CD46 mutants with truncated cytoplasmic tails fail to support bacterial adhesion (Källström et al., 2001), suggesting that this region of the molecule also plays an important role in infection. Here, we repor...

Many bacterial characters, such as colicinogeny (9), antibiotic resistance (25), and production of a hemolysin (21) or an enterotoxin (22), are determined by genes carried on extrachromosomal genetic elements that are transmissible from one bacterium to another by conjugation. Two classes of sex factor responsible for conjugation have been recognized in the Enterobacteriaceae (11). The first, o...

In Escherichia coli, FkpA, PpiA, PpiD, and SurA are the four known periplasmic cis-trans prolyl isomerases. These isomerases facilitate proper protein folding by increasing the rate of transition of proline residues between the cis and trans states. Genetic inactivation of all four periplasmic isomerases resulted in a viable strain that exhibited a decreased growth rate and increased susceptibi...