Productive Chlamydia trachomatis lymphogranuloma venereum 434 infection in cells with augmented or inactivated autophagic activities |
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| Authors: | Niseema Pachikara,Haiyan Zhang,Zui Pan,Shengkan Jin,& Huizhou Fan |
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| Affiliation: | Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey,Piscataway, NJ, USA;;Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ, USA;;Molecular BioSciences Graduate Program, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA;and;Department of Pharmacology, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Piscataway, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, NJ, USA |
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| Abstract: | Autophagy, a eukaryotic cellular activity leading to the degradation of cellular components, serves as a defense mechanism against facultative intracellular bacteria as well as a growth niche for the obligate intracellular bacterium Coxiella burnetii . We here demonstrate that the obligate intracellular bacterial pathogen Chlamydia trachomatis lymphogranuloma venereum strongly induced autophagy in the middle of the chlamydial developmental cycle (24 h after infection), a time point with maximal level of chlamydial replication, but not during the early stages with low overall chlamydial metabolism (before 8 h). No autophagy induction was evident in cells exposed to heat- and UV-inactivated elementary bodies (EBs, the infectious form of Chlamydia ) or to inocula from which EBs had been removed before inoculation. Blocking chlamydial development with chloramphenicol also prevented autophagy induction in cells infected with infectious EBs. It appears that autophagy is activated primarily in response to the metabolic stress consequent to chlamydial replication. However, autophagy-defective ATG5−/− cells supported chlamydial development as efficiently as autophagy-proficient ATG5+/+ cells. |
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| Keywords: | autophagy Chlamydia trachomatis ATG5 LC3 |
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