The mechanical behavior of individual P pili of uropathogenic Escherichia coli has been investigated using optical tweezers. P pili, whose main part constitutes the PapA rod, composed of approximately 10(3) PapA subunits in a helical arrangement, are distributed over the bacterial surface and mediate adhesion to host cells. They are particularly important in the pathogenesis of E. coli colonizi...

The interaction of Pseudomonas aeruginosa type IV pili and the glycosphingolipid asialo-GM1 (aGM1) can mediate bacterial adherence to epithelial cells, but the steps subsequent to this adherence have not been elucidated. To investigate the result of the interaction of pili and aGM1, we used polarized epithelial monolayers of Madin-Darby canine kidney (MDCK) cells in culture, which contained lit...

Background: Phenolic compounds, which are produced routinely by industrial and urban activities, possess dangers to live organisms and environment. Laccases are oxidoreductase enzymes with the ability of remediating a wide variety of phenolic compounds to more benign molecules. The purpose of the present research is surface display of a laccase enzyme with adhesin involved in diffuse adhesion (...

Bacterial pili assembled by the chaperone-usher pathway can mediate microbial attachment, an early step in the establishment of an infection, by binding specifically to sugars present in host tissues. Recent work has begun to reveal the structural basis both of chaperone function in the biogenesis of these pili and of bacterial attachment.

Aeromonas hydrophila is a facultative anaerobe which, under conditions of oxygen depletion, uses Fe(III) as electron acceptor. A. hydrophila produces pili during growth with Fe(III). The study was focused on the characterization of the morphology, the electrical properties and the nature of the bacterial pili. Scanning electron microscopy and conductive-probe atomic force microscopy revealed th...

A quantitative system for screening combinatorial single-chain Fv (scFv) antibody libraries was developed utilizing surface display on Escherichia coli and fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS). This system was employed to isolate clones with high-affinity to a fluorescently-labeled hapten from libraries constructed by randomizing heavy and light-chain residues in the anti-digoxin 26-10 de...

Toxigenic Corynebacterium diphtheriae strains cause diphtheria in humans. The toxigenic C. diphtheriae isolate NCTC13129 produces three distinct heterotrimeric pili that contain SpaA, SpaD, and SpaH, making up the shaft structure. The SpaA pili are known to mediate bacterial adherence to pharyngeal epithelial cells. However, to date little is known about the expression of different pili in vari...

Type IV pili are important virulence factors on the surface of many pathogenic bacteria and have been implicated in a wide range of diverse functions, including attachment, twitching motility, biofilm formation, and horizontal gene transfer. The respiratory pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae deploys type IV pili to take up DNA during transformation. These "competence pili" are composed of the ma...

Increasing multidrug resistance in Enterococcus faecalis, a nosocomial opportunist and common cause of bacterial endocarditis, emphasizes the need for alternative therapeutic approaches such as immunotherapy or immunoprophylaxis. In an earlier study, we demonstrated the presence of antibodies in E. faecalis endocarditis patient sera to recombinant forms of 9 E. faecalis cell wall-anchored prote...

Bacterial biofilms can generate micro-heterogeneity in terms of surface structures. However, little is known about the associated changes in the physics of cell-cell interaction and its impact on the architecture of biofilms. In this study, we used the type IV pilus of Neisseria gonorrhoeae to test whether variation of surface structures induces cell-sorting. We show that the rupture forces bet...