Bacterial adhesin
class of adhesion proteins
Bacterial adhesins are cell-surface components or appendages of bacteria that facilitate adhesion or adherence to other cells or to surfaces, usually in the host they are infecting or living in. Adhesins are a type of virulence factor.
Adherence is an essential step in bacterial pathogenesis or infection, required for colonizing a new host. Adhesion and bacterial adhesins are also a potential target either for prophylaxis or for the treatment of bacterial infections.
Background
Bacteria are typically found attached to and living in close association with surfaces. During the bacterial lifespan, a bacterium is subjected to frequent shear-forces. In the crudest sense, bacterial adhesins serve as anchors allowing bacteria to overcome these environmental shear forces, thus remaining in their desired environment. However, bacterial adhesins do not serve as a sort of universal bacterial Velcro. Rather, they act as specific surface recognition molecules, allowing the targeting of a particular bacterium to a particular surface such as root tissue in plants, lacrimal duct tissues in mammals, or even tooth enamel.
Most fimbria of gram-negative bacteria function as adhesins, but in many cases it is a minor subunit protein at the tip of the fimbriae that is the actual adhesin.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bacterial adhesin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.