Self-association motifs in the enteroaggregative Escherichia coli heat-resistant agglutinin 1 Glaubman, Jessica and Hofmann, Jennifer and Bonney, Megan E. and Park, Sumin and Thomas, Jessica M. and Kokona, Bashkim and Ramos Falcón, Laura I. and Chung, Yoonjie K. and Fairman, Robert and Okeke, Iruka N.,, 162, 1091-1102 (2016), doi = https://doi.org/10.1099/mic.0.000303, publicationName = Microbiology Society, issn = 1350-0872, abstract= The heat-resistant agglutinin 1 (Hra1) is an integral outer membrane protein found in strains of Escherichia coli that are exceptional colonizers. Hra1 from enteroaggregative E. coli strain 042 is sufficient to confer adherence to human epithelial cells and to cause bacterial autoaggregation. Hra1 is closely related to the Tia invasin, which also confers adherence, but not autoaggregation. Here, we have demonstrated that Hra1 mediates autoaggregation by self-association and we hypothesize that at least some surface-exposed amino acid sequences that are present in Hra1, but absent in Tia, represent autoaggregation motifs. We inserted FLAG tags along the length of Hra1 and used immune-dot blots to verify that four in silico-predicted outer loops were indeed surface exposed. In Hra1 we swapped nine candidate motifs in three of these loops, ranging from one to ten amino acids in length, to the corresponding sequences in Tia. Three of the motifs were required for Hra1-mediated autoaggregation. The database was searched for other surface proteins containing these motifs; the GGXWRDDXK motif was also present in a surface-exposed region of Rck, a Salmonella enterica serotype Typhimurium complement resistance protein. Cloning and site-specific mutagenesis demonstrated that Rck can confer weak, GGXWRDDXK-dependent autoaggregation by self-association. Hra1 and Rck appear to form heterologous associations and GGXWRDDXK is required on both molecules for Hra1–Rck association. However, a GGYWRDDLKE peptide was not sufficient to interfere with Hra1-mediated autoaggregation. In the present study, three autoaggregation motifs in an integral outer membrane protein have been identified and it was demonstrated that at least one of them works in the context of a different cell surface., language=, type=