Uropathogenic strains of Escherichia coli (UPEC) can colonize the vagina and kidney and cause infections within the entire urogenital tract. Novel therapeutic approaches are needed to combat the urinary tract infection in women.in our study, First a unique and simple reporter construct for pap and OmpA promoter activity constructed which included luciferase coding sequence of Lampyris turkestanicus, on pET28a vector, replacing existing T7 promoter separately. Bioluminescence activity of both recombinant reporter strains assessed when exposed to Lactobacillus acidophilus biomass and culture supernatant respectively. In a dose dependent manner, culture supernatant of L. acidophilus strongly inhibited recombinant reporter UPEC growth and increased the promoter activity of outer membrane proteins (OMPs) A. porins normally up regulated in response to UPEC membrane stress. Supernatants also down regulated the expression of pap operon, critical adherence factors within the urogenital tract. Our findings indicate that compounds secreted by lactobacilli likely protect the urogenital tract from UPEC colonization and infection by inhibiting growth, inducing stress and down regulating proteins critical for host attachment. The present study and others demonstrated that the production of pap fimbriae and outer membrane proteins in UPEC correlates with environmental stimulus and potentially affected by probiotics.
Lactobacillus acidophilus, pyelonephritis associated pili
© The Author(s) 2014. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, sharing, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.