Adhesins As Virulence Factors
The majority of bacterial pathogens exploit specific adhesion to host cells as their main virulence factor. “A large number of bacterial adhesins with individual receptor specificities have been identified.” Many bacterial pathogens are able to express an array of different adhesins. Expression of these adhesins at different phases during infection play the most important role in adhesion based virulence. Numerous studies have shown that inhibiting a single adhesin in this coordinated effort can often be enough to make a pathogenic bacterium non-virulent. This has led to the exploration of adhesin activity interruption as a method of bacterial infection treatment.
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