After digestion, the NdeI–MfeI fragment was then inserted into the NdeI and MfeI sites of pEF1-CagA1 to obtain the CagA-ΔC mutant. Similar procedures were used to construct the 669CagA-ΔC mutant from strain v669 as described above. To create the full-length CagA construct, CagA CTD69, a fragment encoding amino acids 555–1186 was amplified using primers CagA-CTD69F and CagA-CTDR. After digestion with BglII (at nucleotide 1851) and XbaI, the BglII–XbaI fragment was then inserted into MG-132 in vivo the BglII and XbaI sites of pEF1-CagAΔC

to obtain the full-length CagA construct. AGS cells were grown to 90% confluence in 12-well plates and transfected using Lipofectamine 2000 (Invitrogen). After a 24-h incubation for transfection, cells were infected with wild-type or ∆CagA H. pylori in the absence or presence of various concentrations of lovastatin (Sigma-Aldrich) for 6 h. To prepare total cell lysates, 100 μL of reporter lysis buffer (Promega) was added to each well, and cells were scraped from dishes. An equal volume of luciferase substrate was added to all samples, and luminescence was measured using a microplate luminometer (Biotek). Luciferase activity was normalized to transfection efficiency, which was determined by the β-galactosidase activity generated from a co-transfected β-galactosidase expression vector (Promega). The Student’s t-test was used to calculate the statistical significance

of experimental results between two groups. P < 0.05 was considered significant. We first examined whether sufficient cellular cholesterol plays a crucial role for H. pylori click here CagA-induced IL-8 secretion in AGS cells. Several lipid raft disruptors and usurpers were used to treat cells including: lovastatin (which is a HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor) (Endo, 1981),

nystatin (which chelates filipin to cholesterol and removes cholesterol from membrane) (Anderson et al., 1996), and cholera toxin subunit B (CTX-B, which binds to GM1 in rafts) (Naroeni & Porte, 2002). When cells were pretreated with lovastatin (10–50 μM) and infected with wild-type H. pylori (strain 26695), the levels of IL-8 secretions were significantly decreased compared with untreated cells (Fig. 1a). Lovastatin-treated cells contained lower levels of cellular cholesterol as the concentration of lovastatin increased (Fig. S1a). However, the viability of H. pylori and cells were barely affected under treated with lovastatin (Fig. S1b). In parallel, pretreatment of cells with nystatin and CTX-B also resulted in significant reduction of H. pylori-induced IL-8 production. We next evaluated whether cholesterol was necessary for CagA-mediated IL-8 secretion by use of two CagA functional deficiency mutants (∆CagA and ∆CagE). When compared with cells infected with the wild-type strain, there was a lower level of IL-8 secretion in either ∆CagA- or ∆CagE-infected cells (Fig. 1a).