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Bacterial Adhesion pp 91–103Cite as

Adhesion by Pathogenic Corynebacteria

Part of the Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology book series (AEMB,volume 715)

Abstract

Pathogenic members of the genus Corynebacterium cause a wide range of serious infections in humans including diphtheria. Adhesion to host cells is a crucial step during infection. In Corynebacterium diphtheriae, adhesion is mediated primarily by filamentous structures called pili or fimbriae that are covalently attached to the bacterial cell wall. C. diphtheriae produces three distinct pilus structures, SpaA-, SpaD- and SpaH-type pili. Similar to other types, the prototype SpaA pilus consists of SpaA forming the pilus shaft and two minor pilins SpaB and SpaC located at the base and at the tip, respectively. The minor pilins SpaB/SpaC are critical for bacterial binding to human pharyngeal cells, and thus represent the major adhesins of corynebacteria. Like pili of many other gram-positive microbes, the assembly of corynebacterial pili occurs by a two-step mechanism, whereby pilins are covalently polymerized by a transpeptidase enzyme named pilin-specific sortase and the generated pilus polymer is subsequently anchored to the cell wall peptidoglycan via the base pilin by the housekeeping sortase or a non-polymerizing sortase. This chapter reviews the current knowledge of corynebacterial adhesion, with a specific focus on pilus structures, their assembly, and the mechanism of adhesion mediated by pili.

Keywords

  • Diphtheria Toxin
  • Cell Wall Peptidoglycan
  • Pilus Length
  • Corynebacterium Diphtheriae
  • Corynebacterium Species

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Anjali Mandlik, Anu Swaminathan, Andrew Gasper and Arlene Swierczynski, Arunima Mishra, Chenggang Wu and Chungyu Chang for their invaluable contributions to the studies of pili; supported by grants AI061381 and DE017382 from the NIH to HTT.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston, TX, USA

    Elizabeth A. Rogers

  2. Department of Molecular, Microbial and Structural Biology, University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington, CT, USA

    Asis Das

  3. Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, The University of Texas Medical School at Houston, Houston, TX, 77030, USA

    Hung Ton-That

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  1. Elizabeth A. Rogers
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  2. Asis Das
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Correspondence to Hung Ton-That .

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  1. , Department I, Protein Evolution, Max-Planck Institute for Developmental B, Spemannstr. 35, Tübingen, 72076, Germany

    Dirk Linke

  2. , Institute of Biotechnology, University of Helsinki, Viikinkaari 1, Helsinki, FIN-00014, Finland

    Adrian Goldman

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Rogers, E.A., Das, A., Ton-That, H. (2011). Adhesion by Pathogenic Corynebacteria. In: Linke, D., Goldman, A. (eds) Bacterial Adhesion. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 715. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0940-9_6

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