title: Adherence and motility characteristics of clinical Acinetobacter baumannii isolates.
abstract: Acinetobacter baumannii continues to be a major health problem especially in hospital settings. Herein, features that may play a role in persistence and disease potential were investigated in a collection of clinical A. baumannii strains from Australia. Twitching motility was found to be a common trait in A. baumannii international clone I strains and in abundant biofilm formers, whereas swarming motility was only observed in isolates not classified within the international clone lineages. Bioinformatic analysis of the type IV fimbriae revealed a correlation between PilA sequence homology and motility. A high level of variability in adherence to both abiotic surfaces and epithelial cells was found. We report for the first time the motility characteristics of a large number of A. baumannii isolates and present a direct comparison of A. baumannii binding to nasopharyngeal and lung epithelial cells.
authors.affiliation: School of Biological Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia.
authors.forename: Bart A
authors.initials: BA
authors.lastname: Eijkelkamp
authors.forename: Uwe H
authors.initials: UH
authors.lastname: Stroeher
authors.forename: Karl A
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Hassan
authors.forename: Michael S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Papadimitrious
authors.forename: Ian T
authors.initials: IT
authors.lastname: Paulsen
authors.forename: Melissa H
authors.initials: MH
authors.lastname: Brown
mesh_terms: D000151:Acinetobacter Infections / Q000382:microbiology*; D040981:Acinetobacter baumannii / Q000302:isolation & purification / Q000472:pathogenicity* / Q000502:physiology*; D001315:Australia; D001422:Bacterial Adhesion; D019295:Computational Biology; D004847:Epithelial Cells / Q000382:microbiology; D036781:Fimbriae Proteins / Q000235:genetics; D006801:Humans; D008124:Locomotion
chemical_list: D036781:Fimbriae Proteins