Journal Article

Discovery of fibrillar adhesins across bacterial species

Bateman, Alex, Lafita, Aleix, Monzon, Vivian

2021

Overview

Background Fibrillar adhesins are long multidomain proteins that form filamentous structures at the cell surface of bacteria. They are an important yet understudied class of proteins composed of adhesive and stalk domains that mediate interactions of bacteria with their environment. This study aims to characterize fibrillar adhesins in a wide range of bacterial phyla and to identify new fibrillar adhesin-like proteins to improve our understanding of host-bacteria interactions. Results Through careful literature and computational searches, we identified 82 stalk and 27 adhesive domain families in fibrillar adhesins. Based on the presence of these domains in the UniProt Reference Proteomes database, we identified and analysed 3,542 fibrillar adhesin-like proteins across species of the most common bacterial phyla. We further enumerate the adhesive and stalk domain combinations found in nature and demonstrate that fibrillar adhesins have complex and variable domain architectures, which differ across species. By analysing the domain architecture of fibrillar adhesins, we show that in Gram positive bacteria, adhesive domains are mostly positioned at the N-terminus and cell surface anchors at the C-terminus of the protein, while their positions are more variable in Gram negative bacteria. We provide an open repository of fibrillar adhesin-like proteins and domains to enable further studies of this class of bacterial surface proteins. Conclusion This study provides a domain-based characterization of fibrillar adhesins and demonstrates that they are widely found in species across the main bacterial phyla. We have discovered numerous novel fibrillar adhesins and improved our understanding of pathogenic adhesion and invasion mechanisms.

• Publisher: BioMed Central,BioMed Central Ltd,Springer Nature B.V,BMC
• Subject: Adhesins / Adhesins, Bacterial - genetics / Adhesion / Adhesive protein domain / Adhesives / Animal Genetics and Genomics / Bacteria / Bacteria - genetics / Bacterial Adhesion / Bacterial infections / Bacterial proteins / Bacterial Proteins - genetics / Bacterial surface proteins / Biomedical and Life Sciences / C-Terminus / Cell surface / Computer applications / Genomics / Gram-negative bacteria / Gram-Positive Bacteria / Host-bacteria relationships / Host-pathogen interaction / Investigations / Life Sciences / Membrane Proteins / Microarrays / Microbial Genetics and Genomics / Microbiological research / N-Terminus / Pfam / Physiological aspects / Plant Genetics and Genomics / Prokaryote microbial genomics / Protein domain architecture / Proteins / Proteomes / Proteomics / Research Article / Sequence analysis / Species / Structure