The Thin Pili of <i>Acinetobacter</i> sp. Strain BD413 Mediate Adhesion to Biotic and Abiotic Surfaces
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two structurally different appendages, thin and thick pili, are found in members of the genus Acinetobacter. The presence of pilus structures correlates with different phenotypes, such as adherence to surfaces, a trait not only observed in pathogenic Acinetobacter species, as well as motility. However, their distinct individual roles were unknown. To characterize the role of different pili in the physiology of Acinetobacter, we isolated the thin pili from the cell surface of Acinetobacter sp. strain BD413 (recently recognized as representative of Acinetobacter baylyi), a soil bacterium that rapidly takes up naked DNA from its environment. Electron microscopy revealed that the pilus has an external diameter of 2 to 3 nm for single filaments. The filaments are packed into right-handed bundles. The major protein constituting the pilus was purified, and the encoding gene, acuA, was cloned. AcuA was found to be weakly related to the structural subunit of F17 pili of Escherichia coli. Analyses of the acuA flanking DNA region led to the identification of three closely associated genes, acuD, acuC, and acuG, whose deduced proteins are similar to chaperone, usher, and adhesin of F17-related pili, respectively. Transcriptional analyses revealed that acuA expression is maximal in the late-stationary-growth phase. Mutation of acuA led to a loss of thin pili and concomitantly loss of adhesion to polystyrene and erythrocytes but not loss of competence. Therefore, thin pili of Acinetobacter sp. strain BD413 are suggested to be assembled by the chaperone/usher pathway and are involved in adherence to biotic and abiotic surfaces.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".