Bordetella pertussis and Bordetella bronchiseptica filamentous hemagglutinins are processed at different sites

David Jurnecka; Petr Man; Peter Sebo; Ladislav Bumba

doi:10.1002/2211-5463.12474

Bordetella pertussis and Bordetella bronchiseptica filamentous hemagglutinins are processed at different sites

FEBS Open Bio. 2018 Jun 20;8(8):1256-1266. doi: 10.1002/2211-5463.12474. eCollection 2018 Aug.

Authors

David Jurnecka^{1

2}, Petr Man^{2

3}, Peter Sebo¹, Ladislav Bumba¹

Affiliations

¹ Laboratory of Molecular Biology of Bacterial Pathogens Institute of Microbiology Czech Academy of Sciences Prague 4 Czech Republic.
² Department of Biochemistry Faculty of Science Charles University in Prague Prague 2 Czech Republic.
³ BioCeV - Institute of Microbiology of the Czech Academy of Sciences Vestec Czech Republic.

Abstract

Filamentous hemagglutinin (FHA) mediates adherence and plays an important role in lower respiratory tract infections by pathogenic Bordetellae. The mature FHA proteins of B. pertussis (Bp-FHA) and the B. bronchiseptica (Bb-FHA) are generated by processing of the respective FhaB precursors by the autotransporter subtilisin-type protease SphB1. We have used bottom-up proteomics with differential ¹⁶O/¹⁸O labeling and show that despite high-sequence conservation of the corresponding FhaB segments, the mature Bp-FHA (~ 230 kDa) and Bb-FHA (~ 243 kDa) proteins are processed at different sites of FhaB, after the Ala-2348 and Lys-2479 residues, respectively. Moreover, protease surface accessibility probing by on-column (on-line) digestion of the Bp-FHA and Bb-FHA proteins yielded different peptide patterns, revealing structural differences in the N-terminal and C-terminal domains of the Bp-FHA and Bb-FHA proteins. These data indicate specific structural variations between the highly homologous FHA proteins.

Keywords: Bordetella bronchiseptica; Bordetella pertussis; bacterial pathogenesis; mass spectrometry (MS); protein processing; serine protease.