The food-borne pathogen Campylobacter jejuni responds to the bile salt deoxycholate with countermeasures to reactive oxygen species.

Bile plays an important role in digestion, absorption of fats, and the excretion of waste products, while concurrently providing a critical barrier against colonization by harmful bacteria. Previous studies have demonstrated that gut pathogens react to bile by adapting their protein synthesis. The ability of pathogens to respond to bile is remarkably complex and still incompletely understood. Here we show that Campylobacter jejuni, a leading bacterial cause of human diarrheal illness worldwide, responds to deoxycholate, a component of bile, by altering global gene transcription in a manner consistent with a strategy to mitigate exposure to reactive oxygen stress. More specifically, continuous growth of C. jejuni in deoxycholate was found to: 1) induce the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS); 2) decrease succinate dehydrogenase activity (complex II of the electron transport chain); 3) increase catalase activity that is involved in HO breakdown; and 4) result in DNA strand breaks. Congruently, the addition of 4-hydroxy-TEMPO (TEMPOL), a superoxide dismutase mimic that reacts with superoxide, rescued the growth of C. jejuni cultured in the presence of deoxycholate. We postulate that continuous exposure of a number of enteric pathogens to deoxycholate stimulates a conserved survival response to this stressor.