Understanding TGEV-ETEC Coinfection through the Lens of Proteomics: A Tale of Porcine Diarrhea.

Porcine diarrhea and gastroenteritis are major causes of piglet mortality that result in devastating economic losses to the industry. A plethora of pathogens can cause these diseases, with the transmissible gastroenteritis virus (TGEV) and enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli K88 (ETEC) being two of the most salient. In the December 2017 issue of Proteomics Clinical Aplications, Xia and colleagues used comparative proteomics to shed light on how these microbes interact to cause severe disease . The authors discovered that TGEV induces an epithelial-mesenchymal transition-like phenotype that augments cell adhesion proteins mediating the attachment of ETEC to intestinal epithelial cells. Moreover, coinfection was found to modulate several host proteins that could bolster pathogen persistence. Importantly, the authors observed that ETEC suppresses the production of inflammatory cytokines induced by TGEV, which may in turn promote the long-term survival of both microbes.