Fig. 5

Adhesive profile of CEC15 and EcN strains. The presence of fimbriae/pili and flagella in CEC15 and EcN strains could be confirmed by Transmission electron microscopy of fresh (A and D) and fixated (B and E), and by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) of fixated samples (C and F) of CEC15 and EcN, respectively. A significant quantity of proteins were found on sheared samples of both strains, about half of them being shared between strains (G). The heatmap (H) present the percentage of COG-classified proteins presented in each condition, according to the code: [C] Energy production and conversion; [D] Cell cycle control, cell division, chromosome partitioning; [E] Amino Acid metabolism and transport; [F] Nucleotide metabolism and transport; [G] Carbohydrate metabolism and transport; [H] Coenzyme metabolism; [I] Lipid metabolism; [J] Translation; [K] Transcription; [L] Replication and repair; [M] Cell wall/membrane/envelop biogenesis; [N] Cell motility; [O] Post-translational modification, protein turnover, chaperone functions; [P] Inorganic ion transport and metabolism; [Q] Secondary metabolites biosynthesis, transport and catabolism; [S] Function Unknown; [T] Signal Transduction; [U] Intracellular trafficking and secretion. The effectiveness of these adhesins were tested by adhesion assay on Caco-2 cells (I) were CEC15 presented a better adhesive profile (23.31%) than EcN (1.46%). White arrows indicate the presence of fimbriae/pili. Black arrows indicate flagella. Scale in all pictures is equivalent to 1µm and the pictures were taken on amplification of 30,000 for TEM and 15,000 for SEM