Chickens, Chlorine and Campylobacter: New insights into the redox biology of the most prevalent food-borne pathogen

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Some bacteria get into the food that we eat and cause food-poisoning. Some of these bacteria are quite common but are usually killed during cooking. When chicken meat is not cooked properly, one of these types of bacteria, called Campylobacter jejuni, is a particular problem. It normally lives harmlessly in the intestines of chickens but in humans causes severe diarrohea, which although not usually life-threatening, causes considerable impacts on time off work and in some cases can lead to serious complications. By understanding in detail the way in which this bacterium interacts with its hosts and survives in the food-chain we may be able to stop colonisation or improve killing of the bacteria before human ingestion. We are interested in a specific property of C. jejuni that we think is a vulnerability that can be exploited - it is very sensitive to oxygen and is easily killed by "reactive" oxygen and chlorine species like peroxides and hypochlorite. However, we don't fully understand how this occurs. In this project we will be investigating the effects of hypochlorite on proteins and how this damage is repaired. We will also study how gene expression is changed when the bacteria are exposed to hypochlorite and try to find out how they can "sense" the presence of this chemical. The results should allow us to get a better knowledge of the way in which the bacterium responds to oxidative damage, which could be exploited in future to improve food-chain interventions and to inform policy decisions about the use of such treatments.