Understanding how mutability facilitates survival of alternating selection and bottlenecks by the major food-borne pathogen Campylobacter jejuni

空肠弯曲杆菌是引起肠胃炎的主要食源性病原体。它是鸟类胃肠道中的一种共生生物，通过鸟类之间和肉类产品污染对人类的传播瓶颈，受到许多快速振荡的选择压力。空肠梭菌能够避免这些瓶颈的影响，并存活下来引起人类肠道黏膜的炎症反应，这突出了局部超可变束的关键适应性反应，以避免严格的选择性和非选择性瓶颈的生存。本项目将结合计算模型和实验数据来研究超可变重复束的易变性对空肠梭菌存活的影响。通过使用新的高通量循环分析来评估相变量切换，以告知局部超变异如何有助于空肠梭菌跨越传播屏障的存活的计算模型。

Campylobacter jejuni is a major food-borne cause of gastroenteritis. A commensal organism in the gastrointestinal tract of birds it is subject to numerous rapid oscillating selection pressures through transmission bottlenecks, both between birds and to humans through the contamination of meat products. The ability of C. jejuni to avoid the influence of these bottlenecks and survive to cause the inflammatory response in the human gut mucosa highlights the key adaptive response of local hypermutable tracts to avoid both survival of stringent selective and non-selective bottlenecks. This project will combine both computational modelling and experimental data to examine the effect of mutability of hypermutable repeat tracts and the survival of C. jejuni. Through the use of novel high throughput cyclic assays to assess phase variable switching to inform computation modelling of how local hypermutability contributes to the survival of C. jejuni across transmission barriers.