Legionella pneumophila Attachment to Biofilms of an Acidovorax Isolate from a Drinking Water-Consortium Requires the Lcl
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Legionella pneumophila Attachment to Biofilms of an Acidovorax Isolate from a Drinking Water-Consortium Requires the Lcl-Adhesin Protein Christa H. Chatfield 1 & Jenna Zaia 1 & Cassidy Sauer 1 Received: 9 December 2019 / Revised: 2 March 2020 / Accepted: 7 April 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Human infection by Legionella pneumophila (Lpn) only occurs via contaminated water from man-made sources, and eradication of these bacteria from man-made water systems is complicated by biofilm colonization. Using a continuously fed biofilm reactor model, we grew a biofilm consortium from potable water that was able to prolong recovery of Lpn CFU from biofilms. This effect was recreated using a subset of those species in a simplified consortium composed of eight bacterial isolates from the first biofilm reactor. In the reactor with the eight-species consortium, Lpn biofilm CFU was relatively stable over a 12-day trial. An isolate of Acidovorax from the consortium was, as a single species biofilm, able to promote Lpn surface attachment. Other isolates from the Pelomonas genus grew as equally robust biofilms alone, but did not promote surface attachment of Lpn. This attachment was disrupted by cationic polysaccharides and loss of the Lpn Lcl collagen-like adhesin protein. This work demonstrates that, while Lpn was fairly incompetent at attachment to surfaces to form a biofilm alone, pre-existing biofilms allowed attachment of Lpn as secondary colonizers. In addition, we demonstrate that initial attachment of Lpn to Acidovorax biofilms is likely via the Lcladhesin protein. Keywords Biofilms . Legionella . Legionnaires’ disease . Bacterial adhesins
Introduction Human infection by certain bacteria of the genus Legionella leads to the pneumonia known as Legionnaires’ disease (LD), as well as to the fairly rare and self-limiting fever known as Pontiac fever (Gargano 2013; Hampton 2011). Infection occurs via inhalation of contaminated aerosols from man-made water sources, and ~ 90% of cases are from infection by Legionella pneumophila (Lpn) (Neil and Berkelman 2008). When detected in municipal or drinking water, high-level disinfection treatments such as chlorine and temperature shocks can reduce Legionella numbers, but recolonization or Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10123-020-00126-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Christa H. Chatfield [email protected] 1
Department of Biological Sciences, SUNY Cortland, Cortland, New York, USA
reemergence of Legionella spp. after such treatments does occur (García et al. 2008; Thomas et al. 2004; Lin et al. 1998). Bacterial biofilms are known to constitute the majority of the bacteria within water systems that maintain high chlorine, as well as high flow-through and high-surface sheer conditions, where stagnant and bulk-water resident cells are uncommon (Srinivasan et al. 2008). As biofilms are recalcitrant to disinfection, accumulation
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