Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology Volume 431 Series Editors Rafi Ahmed School of Medicine, Rollins Research Center, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA Shizuo Akira Immunology Frontier Research Center, Osaka University, Suita, Osaka, Japan Klaus Aktories Faculty of Medicine, Institute of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany Arturo Casadevall W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA Richard W. Compans Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA Jorge E. Galan Boyer Ctr. for Molecular Medicine, School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA Adolfo Garcia-Sastre Department of Microbiology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA Bernard Malissen Parc Scientifique de Luminy, Centre d‘Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy, Marseille, France Rino Rappuoli GSK Vaccines, Siena, Italy The review series Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology provides a synthesis of the latest research findings in the areas of molecular immunology, bacteriology and virology. Each timely volume contains a wealth of information on the featured subject. This review series is designed to provide access to up-to-date, often previously unpublished information. 2019 Impact Factor: 3.095., 5-Year Impact Factor: 3.895 2019 Eigenfaktor Score: 0.00081, Article Influence Score: 1.363 2019 Cite Score: 6.0, SNIP: 1.023, h5-Index: 43 More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/82 Steffen Backert Editor Fighting Campylobacter Infections Towards a One Health Approach Responsible Series Editor: Shizuo Akira 123 Editor Steffen Backert Division of Microbiology Department of Biology University of Erlangen-Nuremberg Erlangen, Germany ISSN 0070-217X ISSN 2196-9965 (electronic) Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology ISBN 978-3-030-65480-1 ISBN 978-3-030-65481-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65481-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, corrected publication 2021 Chapters “Population Biology and Comparative Genomics of Campylobacter Species” and “Natural Competence and Horizontal Gene Transfer in Campylobacter” are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapter. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publi- cation does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Foreword A Very Personal Foreword: Campylobacter, My First Love in Microbiology I feel very much honored to be contacted by Steffen Backert for providing a foreword for the Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology (CTMI) book on Fighting Campylobacter Infections: Towards a One Health Approach that he has edited. After having worked in Campylobacter research area for several decades, I was very impressed by the extraordinary list of chapters and the great collection of internationally recognized experts who contributed to this volume. As a matter of fact, writing the foreword offered to me a perfect opportunity to study the whole book. Thus, I am very happy to write this in a very personal way. In the long history of the Campylobacter research, the pathogenicity of these remarkable bacteria was gradually enlightened. In a first description more than 134 years ago, the German medical doctor and bacteriologist Theodor Escherich described “Vibrio-like” microbes in the colonic mucus of children (Escherich 1886), a study that was not recognized by the international community until 1985 (Kist 1986a). In these early days, Theodor Escherich was working as a pediatrician at a children’s hospital in Munich, where he had seen 72 infants with diarrhea (Cholera infantum) during the summer of 1885. Seventeen of them died from the disease, and in the postmortem examination, Theodor Escherich microscopically detected “Vibrio-like” microbes in the colonic mucosa of 15 infants. He was not able to grow the bacteria under laboratory conditions, but made drawings and described their morphology in detail. The drawings and description clearly fit with Campylobacter bacteria (Kist 1986a). About 45 years after this first report by Theodor Escherich, bacteria isolated from the intestines of sick calves and pigs were named Vibrio jejuni (Jones et al. 1931) and Vibrio coli (Doyle 1944), respectively. In addition, these bacteria were detected in ox bile blood-cultures as a “Vibrio of bovine origin”, when a gastroenteritis outbreak was investigated in a correctional institution of the USA (Levy 1946). “Related Vibrio” species were also discovered elsewhere in patients with diarrheal disease (King 1957). Later, these v vi Foreword “related Vibrio-like” microbes, probably all corresponding to Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli as we know them today, were included in the new genus Campylobacter (Sebald and Véron 1963). Subsequently, firstly in 1968, Campylobacter spp. could be isolated and grown from human diarrheal stools (Cooper and Slee 1971; Dekeyser et al. 1972). The development of improved culturing methods in laboratories facilitated the successful isolation and growth of these bacteria from human stool samples, which was the prerequisite that C. jejuni or C. coli could be confirmed as human enteric pathogens (Skirrow 1977). Indeed, C. jejuni and C. coli are extremely fascinating, highly successful, myste- rious and also quite challenging organisms. They are elegantly coiled when they are young and becoming more coccoid in aging stages, a bit like some of us. And yes, Campylobacter was actually my first love in microbiology. And so, for me, this was the beginning of a “love story.” At the time when Martin Skirrow’s communication “Campylobacter enteritis – a new disease” (Skirrow 1977) appeared, I started as a young medical doctor and to my knowledge firstly in Germany implementing cultural and biochemical methods for detection and identification of Campylobacter from stool specimens in our diagnostic laboratory at the Institute of Hygiene and Microbiology at Freiburg University. And in order to prepare a dissertation for a professorship, I launched at the end of 1970 a comprehensive study on incidence, clinics and epidemiological risk factors of infectious enteritis, which covered all causative agents known at that time, including also Campylobacter. In this study, we investigated more than 17,000 patients with diarrhea, and in 945 cases (5.3%) Campylobacter ssp. were isolated from stool specimens (Kist 1986b). In a multivariate analysis, fever and bloody– watery diarrhea were shown as significant clinical symptoms due to Campylobacter infection, with bloody diarrhea more common in younger age-groups and pre- dominantly watery diarrhea in older age-groups. Vomiting, however, was not a typical symptom. Follow-up of the above-mentioned 945 cases revealed the development of a total of three patients with neurological complications, namely two Guillain–Barré syndromes and one Miller Fisher syndrome (Kist 1986b). How I, as the first German microbiologist in this field, got access to the inter- national “Campylobacter community” was then due to a fortunate accident. In 1980 at a meeting of the “Austrian Society for Hygiene, Microbiology and Preventive Medicine,” which took place in Klosterneuburg, a historic monastery nearby Vienna, I presented my first Campylobacter-related results of the above study, and I finished my talk with the conclusions “the typical campylobacteriosis patient is a young boy, growing up in a rural area, who drinks raw milk, and likes eating chicken and swimming in natural surface waters.” My presentation was the last before lunch, and some people involved me into a discussion after the end of the session. And nobody got aware that the doors were locked and we were trapped in this wonderful ancient lecture room. So we missed the lunch, but I got in contact with a colleague from the British Public Health Laboratory Service (PHLS). We had a highly stimulating conversation with the result that I was invited to the very first International