Invited Speaker

Systems Biology of Host-pathogen Interaction in Campylobacter
A. Tamaddoni-Nezhad, R. Barton, P. Hitchen, E. Kay, V. Lesk, F. Turner, A. Dell, C. Rawlings, M. Sternberg, B. Wren, S. Muggleton
UK


Campylobacter jejuni is a major cause of food poisoning world-wide. Surface glycans play important roles in the ability of Campylobacter to infect a host. In this talk we present an exemplar research programme at the Centre for Integrative Systems Biology at Imperial College (CISBIC) which aims at building predictive models that will allow us to infer the surface glycome from genetic data. The modeling techniques include a cycle of hypotheses generation and experimentation which allows the predictions of the models to be tested. A logic-based representation & inference has been used to infer hypotheses about the Polysaccharide structures in Campylobacter from mutants data (gene knock-out experiments) and a background knowledge (e.g. known biochemical pathways and glycan structures) which can potentially be incomplete. Experiments on capsule bio-synthetic pathway, which is a less understood pathway, the models suggested explicit hypotheses concerning the functions of unknown genes. Some of the hypotheses are novel and yet to be tested experimentally in vivo. These include predictions about the involvement of some putative transferases of unknown function in the assembly of the Ribfuranose-Monosaccharide of the capsule structure. Ongoing experiments using NMR/MS techniques aim at testing these hypotheses. This could lead to the discovery of new vaccinations against Campylobacter.