What are Adhesins and what role do they play in bacterial adherence?
Adhesins are virulence factors that are involved in bacterial adherence. They attach to either host cell structures or extracellular molecules that bind to host cells or to extracellular matrix. Advances in molecular biological techniques have been crucial in characterizing these cell surface structures, with attention specifically to staphylococcal, streptococcal, and enterococcal species, which account for the large majority of IE cases. The availability of an experimental animal model of endocarditis has been a pivotal aspect of these pathogenesis investigations. It has served as the ultimate evaluation of in vitro molecular techniques to obtain mutant and recombinant isolates that are developed to examine the effects of a single purported virulence factor expressed by a wild-type strain.