jejuni and epithelial cells is capable of inducing pro-inflammatory and pro-secretory processes [8, 16]. These are associated with cellular invasion [17] and secretion of IL8 by CLDT dependent and independent mechanisms [16, 18]. Direct use of a BCE has allowed us to use a reductionist approach to investigate effects of C. jejuni that are not dominated by these linked processes of cellular invasion by live bacteria and by toxin based cell lysis. Alectinib molecular weight BCE

has been determined to contain polysaccharide and protein components of the cell. As demonstrated previously the NF-κB inducing activity of C. jejuni BCE is relatively insensitive to digestion by protease K [8]. However the protein content has been determined using tryptic digests of SDS-polyacryamide extracted protein bands using MALDI-TOF

mass spectrometry as flagellin (Cj1339c), trigger factor (Cj0193c), lipoprotein (Cj0983), major outer membrane protein (Cj0599), cytochrome-c peroxidase (Cj0358), bacterioferritin (Cj1534c), cell binding Selleck Y27632 factor PEB4A (Cj0496), hypothetical protein (Cj0706), periplasmic protein (Cj0772c), fibronectin binding protein (Cj1478c), non-heme iron protein (Cj0012c), periplasmic protein (Cj1380), periplasmic protein (Cj0420), periplasmic protein (Cj0998c), DNA-binding protein HU (Cj0913c), periplasmic cytochrome C (Cj1153) and thioredoxin (Cj0147c) [11]. The polysaccharide component features α-glucan oligomers. The C. jejuni extract is notably devoid of the dominating heat-labile effects of the CLDT. C. jejuni BCE, like infection with live C. jejuni, has been shown to be a potent inducer of NF-κB using either luciferase based reporter assays, western blots with antibodies against IκB or electrophoretic mobility shift assays in epithelial cells [8] but, unlike treatment with live C. jejuni, this does not lead to host cell lysis. These observations are consistent with the hypothesis that a heat stable component plays a significant role in the pro-inflammatory response upon exposure

to C. jejuni. We hypothesize that NF-κB modulation is central to the response Montelukast Sodium of enterocytes to C. jejuni BCE; to study this we determined the global changes in gene expression induced by C. jejuni BCE treatment of the well-differentiated human colonocyte line HCA-7, clone 29. In order to ensure the relevance of our results we have adopted stringent criteria for the identification of significantly affected genes and used the IPA program to determine the functional links between these gene products, identify the signalling pathways and networks to which they belong. These changes were validated by showing similar affects on mRNA levels when genes of interest were investigated by real-time quantitative PCR. Consistent with the initial hypothesis that NF-κB plays a major role in the response of HCA-7 cells to C. jejuni BCE, and features in 8 of the 11 designated signalling pathways identified by IPA as up-regulated.