Back

Uropathogenic E. coli induces DNA damage in the bladder

Chagneau, C. V.; Massip, C.; Bossuet-Greif, N.; Fremez, C.; Motta, J.-P.; Shima, A.; Besson, C.; Le Faouder, P.; Cenac, N.; Roth, M.-P.; Coppin, H.; Fontanie, M.; Martin, P.; Nougayrede, J.-P.; Oswald, E.

2020-05-07 microbiology
10.1101/2020.05.07.080291 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are among the most common outpatient infections, with a lifetime incidence of around 60% in women. We analysed urine samples from 223 patients with community-acquired UTIs and report the presence of a metabolite released during the synthesis of colibactin, a bacterial genotoxin, in 50 of the samples examined. Uropathogenic Escherichia coli strains isolated from these patients, as well as the archetypal E. coli strain UTI89, were found to produce colibactin. In a murine model of UTI, the machinery producing colibactin was expressed during the early hours of the infection, when intracellular bacterial communities form. We observed extensive DNA damage both in umbrella and bladder progenitor cells. To the best of our knowledge this is the first report of colibactin production in UTIs in humans and its genotoxicity in bladder cells. This bacterial genotoxin, which is increasingly suspected to promote colorectal cancer, should also be scrutinised in the context of bladder cancer.

Matching journals

The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.