The nonrandom binding distribution ofStreptococcus pneumoniaeto type II pneumocytes in culture is dependent on the relative distribution of cells among the phases of the cell cycle

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Abstract
The adherence of Streptococcus pneumoniae to epithelial (A549) lung cells was studied and the bacterial binding distribution was found to be nonrandom (non-Gaussian). Analysis of the dependency of bacterial binding on the cell cycle of A549 cells revealed that approximately 1.8 times more bacteria bind to G2cells than to G0-G1phase cells. Furthermore, bacterial binding curves exhibited a plateau of binding to G2cells at a normalized bacteria to cell ratio approximately 1.8 times larger than that at which the plateau of binding to G0-G1cell was observed. Since G2cells are on average 1.4-1.8 times larger than G0-G1cells, the results indicate that bacterial binding is proportional to cell size and not to the preferential binding (higher affinity) of bacteria to A549 cells in the G2phase. Finally, the non-Gaussian distribution of bacterial binding could be mathematically modeled by a linear combination of three Gaussian distributions each representing bacterial binding to cells in a particular phase of the cell cycle (G0-G1, S, and G2-M). Because the Gaussian function contains a term that takes into account the relative number of cells in each of the phases, this last result implies that the overall (non-Gaussian) binding distribution (and hence the median of bacterial binding) can be highly sensitive to the relative proportion of cells in the various phases of the cell cycle.Key words: bacterial adherence, Streptococcus pneumoniae, flow cytometry, cell cycle.

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