Gingival Epithelial Cell Transcriptional Responses to Commensal and Opportunistic Oral Microbial Species

Transcriptional profiling and ontology tools were utilized to define the biological pathways of gingival epithelial cells modulated by coculture with the oral commensal Streptococcus gordonii and the opportunistic commensal Fusobacterium nucleatum. Overall, F. nucleatum and S. gordonii perturbed the gingival epithelial cell transcriptome much less significantly than the oral pathogens Porphyromonas gingivalis and Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans perturbed the transcriptome, indicating that there was a greater degree of host adaptation by the commensal species (M. Handfield, J. J. Mans, G. Zheng, M. C. Lopez, S. Mao, A. Progulske-Fox, G. Narasimhan, H. V. Baker, and R. J. Lamont, Cell. Microbiol. 7:811-823, 2005). The biological pathways significantly impacted by F. nucleatum and S. gordonii included the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) and Toll-like receptor signaling pathways. Differential regulation of GADD45 and DUSP4, key components of the MAPK pathway, was confirmed at the protein level by Western blotting. Modulation of the MAPK pathway is likely to affect host cell proliferation and differentiation. In addition, both the MAPK and Toll-like receptor pathways ultimately converge on cytokine gene expression. An enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay of secreted interleukin-6 (IL-6) and IL-8 demonstrated that F. nucleatum induced production of these cytokines, whereas S. gordonii inhibited secretion from the epithelial cells. Stimulation of secretion of proinflammatory cytokines from epithelial cells may reflect the invasive phenotype of F. nucleatum and contribute to the greater pathogenic potential of F. nucleatum than of S. gordonii.