Alteration or adaptation, the two roads for human gastric mucin glycosylation infected by Helicobacter pylori.

Helicobacter pylori is a Gram-negative bacterium that colonizes the mucus niche of the gastric mucosa and infects more than half of the world's human population. Chronic infection may cause gastritis, duodenal ulcer, intestinal metaplasia or gastric cancer. In the stomach, H. pylori interacts with O-glycans of gastric mucins but the mechanism by which the bacteria succeed in altering the mucosa remains mainly unknown. To better understand the physiopathology of the infection, inhibitory adhesion assays were performed with various O-glycans expressed by human gastric mucins, and topographic expression of gastric mucins MUC5AC and MUC6 was analyzed for healthy uninfected individuals, for infected asymptomatic individuals and for patients infected by H. pylori and having the incomplete type of intestinal metaplasia. The glycosylation of the gastric mucosa of asymptomatic individuals infected by H. pylori was determined and compared with the glycosylation pattern found for patients with the incomplete type of intestinal metaplasia. Results show that H. pylori manages to modulate host's glycosylation during the course of infection in order to create a favorable niche, whereas asymptomatic infected individuals seem to counteract further steps of infection development by adapting their mucus glycosylation.