A Gastric Pathogen Moves Chemotaxis in a New Direction

For almost 50 years, Escherichia coli has been the model for understanding how bacteria orient their movement in response to chemical cues, but recent studies of chemotaxis in other bacteria have revealed interesting variations from prevailing paradigms. Investigating the human pathogen Helicobacter pylori, Amieva and colleagues [mBio 2(4):e00098-11, 2011] discovered a new chemotaxis regulator, ChePep, which modulates swimming behavior through the canonical histidine-aspartate phosphorelay system. Functionally conserved among the epsilonproteobacteria, ChePep is essential for H. pylori to navigate deep into the stomach’s gastric glands and may be an attractive target for novel antibiotics.