The Sialylated Lipooligosaccharide Outer Core in <i>Campylobacter jejuni</i> Is an Important Determinant for Epithelial Cell Invasion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Campylobacter jejuni is a frequent cause of bacterial gastroenteritis worldwide. Lipooligosaccharide (LOS) has been identified as an important virulence factor that may play a role in microbial adhesion and invasion. Here we specifically address the question of whether LOS sialylation affects the interaction of C. jejuni with human epithelial cells. For this purpose, 14 strains associated with Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), 34 enteritis-associated strains, the 81-176 reference strain, and 6 Penner serotype strains were tested for invasion of two epithelial cell lines. C. jejuni strains expressing sialylated LOS (classes A, B, and C) invaded cells significantly more frequently than strains expressing nonsialylated LOS (classes D and E) (P < 0.0001). To further explore this observation, we inactivated the LOS sialyltransferase (Cst-II) via knockout mutagenesis in three GBS-associated C. jejuni strains expressing sialylated LOS (GB2, GB11, and GB19). All knockout strains displayed significantly lower levels of invasion than the respective wild types. Complementation of a Deltacst-II mutant strain restored LOS sialylation and reset the invasiveness to wild-type levels. Finally, formalin-fixed wild-type strains GB2, GB11 and GB19, but not the isogenic Deltacst-II mutants that lack sialic acid, were able to inhibit epithelial invasion by viable GB2, GB11, and GB19 strains. We conclude that sialylation of the LOS outer core contributes significantly to epithelial invasion by C. jejuni and may thus play a role in subsequent postinfectious pathologies.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 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".