Identification of Campylobacter jejuni genes involved in the response to stomach transit. Campylobacter jejuni

Campylobacter jejuni causes food- and water-borne gastroenteritis, and as such must survive passage through the stomach in order to reach the gastrointestinal tract. While little is known about how C. jejuni survives transit through the stomach, its low infectious dose suggests it is well equipped to sense and respond to acid shock. In this study, the transcriptional profile of C. jejuni NCTC 11168 was obtained after exposure to in in vivo (piglet stomach) acid shock. Keywords: acid shock; in vivo study; transit through the host stomach Overall design: The in vivo transcriptome profile of C. jejuni was obtained as the bacterium transited through the piglet stomach. The piglets were fed ~10e13 viable bacteria. Total RNA was extracted from the stomach contents of 2 piglets 20 min following oral inoculation with C. jejuni, and the RNA samples were pooled. The extracted RNA was reverse-transcribed, labeled and subjected to microarray analysis by competitive hybridization with cDNA derived from C. jejuni grown to mid-log phase in vitro in MH medium (pH 7.0). The in vivo data comprise 6 technical replicates from a single pool of RNAs (obtained from 2 piglets).