Campylobacter jejuni: components for adherence to and invasion of eukaryotic cells.

Campylobacter (C.) jejuni is the most important reported cause for bacterial diarrhoea. The infection can be accompanied by fever and abdominal cramps and in rare cases the Guillain-Barré syndrome or reactive arthritis can develop as a post-infection complication. Several biological properties of Cjejuni, e. g. motility and chemotaxis, contribute to the biological fitness of the pathogen. For this, deficiencies in the function of these features clearly reduce the pathogenicity of C. jejuni without being a virulence factor per se. Opposing to this, there are two essential requirements to determine the virulence of C. jejuni which represent the adherence to, and the invasion of host cells. Thereby, adherence, as a virulence factor, is mediated by many different bacterial-derived components like proteins but also by several oligo- and polysaccharide structures that are linked to surface proteins but also to the flagella. In addition, several invasion-relevant features of C. jejuni have been detected so far. Whereas some of them are described functionally to modulate cytoskeleton arrangement of the host cell, others are only described as invasion relevant. Indeed, investigations with respect to the pathogenic potential of some adherence- and invasion-relevant components did not give identical results indicating that their relevance might depend on the interplay of the respective C. jejuni strains used in these studies with the corresponding host cells. This review summarizes the C. jejuni components for adherence to and invasion of host cells together with their particular mode of action if known.