"Adhesion and invasion capacity to human epithelial cells and its relation to the presence of virulence genes, motility and biofilm formation of Campylobacter jejuni strains isolated from chicken and bovine".

Campylobacter jejuni is a zoonotic pathogen transmitted through the "farm to fork" route. Outbreaks are associated with consumption of chicken meat, however, other sources as been described. Currently, there is not enough data comparing the virulence of strains isolated from these reservoirs. In our study we compared C. jejuni strains isolated from broiler chicken and dairy cattle through determining their ability to adhere to and invade in vitro human colonic epithelial cell line T84 with their motility, formation of biofilms, and presence of eight virulence genes. A Wilcoxon Rank Sum test was performed to establish the relationship between presence of the studied genes and cellular invasion and adhesion, as well as differences between animal species of origin of the isolate. A Spearman correlation was performed to assess the relationship between invasion and motility, along with invasion and biofilm generation. The virB11 gene was positively associated with the adherence capacity of the strains (mean difference = 0.21, p = 0.006), and strains isolated from chickens showed a significant difference for adherence compared with strains isolated from cattle (p = 0.0001). Our results indicate that strains of C. jejuni have a difference in their adherence capacity depending on the animal reservoir from which they came, with chicken isolates displaying higher virulence compared to dairy cattle isolates.