Selection for urease activity during Helicobacter pylori infection of rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta).

Helicobacter pylori strain J166 recovered from experimentally inoculated rhesus monkeys had up to a 250-fold-increased urease activity over that before inoculation. This was found to result from the selection of urease positive J166 clones from a heterogeneous inoculum, which was predominantly urease negative due to a 1-bp insertion in the ureA gene. These results confirm the importance of urease for H. pylori colonization. Strain J166 is particularly well adapted to the rhesus monkey, since it colonized preferentially despite the fact that less than 0.1% of the inoculum was urease positive.