Identification of Campylobacter jejuni genes involved in the response to acidic pH

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 vitro acid shock. Keywords: acid shock; in vitro study; time course Time course experiments: C. jejuni gene expression was monitored over a 20 min period following acid shock (pH 4.5). Total RNA was extracted from samples taken 2, 4, 12, 16 and 20 min after the acid challenge. The relative abundance of each transcript was monitored by competitive hybridization to C. jejuni microarray of cDNA obtained from C. jejuni exposed to MH-MES medium at pH 7.0 and cDNA from C. jejuni exposed to MH-MES medium at pH 4.5 for each of the time points. Two biological replicates per experiment and 3 technical replicates for each biological replicate