Newswise — In a paper published in the December 11 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Sheryl Justice, PhD, a principal investigator in the Center for Microbial Pathogenesis at Columbus Children's Hospital, and colleagues from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, present research describing the strategies Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria use to evade the body's natural defenses against urinary tract infections. Urinary tract infections are a useful model to study molecular details between the host and pathogen because the bladder uses diverse tactics to combat infectious organisms. E. coli bacteria cause 70 to 90 percent of these infections.
Previous research revealed how during a urinary tract infection, bacteria replicate, change shape and work together to defeat the body's infection-fighting defenses. Elements of this cycle allow bacteria to stay within the body in a "pod-like" structure and cause recurrent infections, even when a patient has taken an antibiotic and experienced no new exposure to bacteria.
Justice and her colleagues' current research further reveals how E. coli bacteria in infected urinary bladders assemble in a highly organized manner, forming strands, or filaments, as one way to evade the body's immune response and cause recurrent infection. "By understanding the strategies E. coli bacteria employ to remain in the body during a urinary tract infection, we may be able to determine the techniques of other infection-causing bacteria," Justice explained. "Ultimately our goal is to identify ways to interrupt the cycle to stop repeated infections and change how we look at drug therapies to combat these infections."
Justice and her colleagues plan to study additional species of bacteria in bladder infections to determine if other bacteria behave in similar ways. This research may be especially important for other chronic infections by bacteria with growth and development stages similar to E. coli.
Prior to joining the Center for Microbial Pathogenesis at Columbus Children's, Justice was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Molecular Microbiology at Washington University. She was awarded a PhD in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from the University of Connecticut in 2001.
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