The contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the VA or NIH. Competing interests: the authors have no competing interests. Dr. Graham is a unpaid consultant for Novartis in relation to vaccine development for treatment or prevention of H. pylori infection. Dr. Graham is PLX3397 purchase also a paid consultant for RedHill Biopharma regarding novel H. pylori therapies and for Otsuka Pharmaceuticals regarding diagnostic testing. Dr. Graham has received royalties from Baylor College of Medicine patents covering materials related to 13C-urea breath

test. Xavier Calvet has participated in advisory boards for Astra-Zeneca, has served as a speaker for AstraZeneca and Almirall-Prodesfarma, and has received research support from AstraZeneca and Janssen-Cilag. “
“The risk factors for acquiring Helicobacter pylori and Human

Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) infections are different: H. pylori is transmitted by gastro- or fecal-oral routes and is associated with low socioeconomic conditions, while HIV is transmitted through sexual intercourse, infected body fluids, and transplacentally. If the host responses to these infections were independent, the prevalence of H. pylori should be similar see more in HIV-infected and non-infected patients. Yet, several studies have detected a lower prevalence of H. pylori in patients with HIV infection, whereas other studies found either no differences or greater rates of H. pylori infection in HIV-positive subjects. To review studies that addressed the issue of these two simultaneous infections and attempt to determine whether reliable conclusions can be drawn from this corpus of often contrasting evidence. Electronic literature search for relevant publications, followed by manual search of additional citations from extracted articles. The initial search yielded 44 publications; after excluding case reports, reviews, narrowly focused articles, and duplicate reports, there remained 29 articles, which are the corpus of this review. With one exception, all studies reported higher rates

of H. pylori infection in HIV-negative subjects. Five studies also examined the CD4 lymphocyte MCE counts and found an inverse correlation between the degree of immunosuppression and the prevalence of active H. pylori infection. Current evidence suggests that it is likely that H. pylori needs a functional immune system to successfully and persistently colonize the human gastric mucosa. “
“Bacterial genomes are compacted by association with histone-like proteins to form a complex known as bacterial chromatin. The histone-like protein HU is capable of binding and bending the DNA molecule, a function related to compaction, protection, and regulation of gene expression. In Helicobacter pylori, HU is the only histone-like protein described so far.