AtaA, a New Member of the Trimeric Autotransporter Adhesins from Acinetobacter sp. Tol 5 Mediating High Adhesiveness to Various Abiotic Surfaces

Acinetobacter sp. Tol 5 exhibits an autoagglutinating nature and noteworthy adhesiveness to various abiotic surfaces from hydrophobic plastics to hydrophilic glass and stainless steel. Although previous studies have suggested that bacterionanofibers on Tol 5 cells are involved in the adhesive phenotype of Tol 5, the fiber that directly mediates Tol 5 adhesion has remained unknown. Here, we present a new member of trimeric autotransporter adhesins designated AtaA, which we discovered by analyzing a less adhesive mutant of Tol 5, T1, obtained by transposon mutagenesis. AtaA forms thinner and shorter nanofibers than fimbriae on Tol 5 cells. We performed target disruption of ataA by allelic marker exchange, and the resulting ΔataA strain was complemented with ataA on the Escherichia coli-Acinetobacter shuttle vector, which was newly constructed. These results proved that AtaA is essential for Tol 5’s autoagglutinating nature and high adhesiveness to surfaces of various materials. In addition, the adhesiveness to solid surfaces mediated by AtaA is notably higher than that mediated by YadA of Yersinia enterocolitica WA-314. Moreover, and importantly, these characteristics can be conferred to the non-adhesive, non-agglutinating bacterium Acinetobacter sp. ADP1 in trans by transformation with ataA, with expected applications to microbial immobilization.