Understanding Campylobacter jejuni pathogenesis via protein-protein interactions and posttranslational modifications

Abstract

The post-genome era has been fundamentally driven by high-throughput and global technologies such as transcriptomics and proteomics that have enabled comparative analyses of cells, tissues and organisms under ‘control’ and ‘test’ conditions. This research however, while hugely significant, has generally ignored the dimensionality of protein biochemistry; while concentrating on the relative abundance of transcripts and proteins, the knowledge that proteins largely convey functions by forming transient or covalent interactions, such as protein complexes, has been mostly neglected. Additionally, the plethora of protein post-translational modifications (PTMs), and their role in modulating protein functions, has also been overlooked beyond many large-scale site-specific studies primarily focusing on signalling. This thesis aimed to exploit these knowledge gaps to provide genome-wide protein interaction and PTM acetylome maps of the bacterial pathogen Campylobacter jejuni, and to develop membrane-focused and quantitative strategies for determining how environmental stress influences putative protein functions via altered interactions and lysine acetylation (KAc).