Discrimination of dominant H. pylori strains isolated from patients with different gastroduodenal pathologies by protein profiling

Background: It is not clear what factors determine divergent outcomes of infections caused by H.pylori. The aim of this study was to differentiate H. pylori strains isolated from the patients with different gastroduodenal pathologies by protein profiling.

Material and methods: The protein profiles of different strains of H. pylori isolated from 3 groups of patients with ulcerative disease, nonulcerative gastritis and cancer disease were analyzed using 1D-SDS-PAGE.

Results: Based on the highly divergent protein patterns, the similarity of the strains inside each group was 75%, 76.47% and 78.57% for cancerous, ulcerative and no ulcerative groups, respectively, while about 30.76% of the protein bands were common in all strains isolated from three groups of the patients. Some of the observed bands were significantly specific for each group. We speculated that some H. pylori strains might be more associated with a specific disease than others, leading to the clustering of some, but not all, strains within each disease group.

Conclusion: This study showed that protein profile can be a criterion used for discriminating of dominant states in different gastric clinical states. Specific and dominant proteins of different strains isolated from three groups of patients under the study could be welcome candidates for further exploration to be used both for laboratory tests, which analyze disease-specific H. pylori strains, and for diagnosis of different diseases and outcomes associated with this widespread bacterium.