Transcriptome of Arabidopsis thaliana plants treated with the human pathogen Campylobacter jejuni

•Animal pathogens can infect and colonize plants.•Animals and plants respond to pathogens in a similar manner.•Inoculation of Arabidopsis thaliana with Campylobacter jejuni occurs in FLS-dependent and independent manner.•Transcriptome response of plants to Campylobacter jejuni and pathogenic Escherichia coli O157-H7 differs drastically.

Recognition of pathogen infection in plants and animals occurs through interaction of pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) with pattern recognition receptors (PRR), such as, for example, the recognition of flagellin by Toll-like receptor (TLR) 5 in animals and FLS2 in plants.In this work we exposed wild type and fls2 Arabidopsis thaliana mutant to Campylobacter jejuni. Transcriptome profiling revealed differentially expressed genes in both genetic backgrounds, with ~ 30% overlap in the upregulated group category. The response of fls2 mutant was more robust as more genes changed their expression and larger number of GO term categories was enriched in the mutant. Comparison of the response to Arabidopsis to C. jejuni with response to Escherichia coli O157:H7 showed only partial overlap, with the response in Col-0 plants having more similarities in commonly upregulated genes and enriched GO term categories than the response in fls2 plants. Whereas in the Col-0, GO terms “response to bacteria”, “leucine-rich repeats” and “plant-type cell wall” were commonly enriched between two animal pathogens tested. In the mutant, GO terms associated with abiotic stress response were enriched for both pathogens. Analysis of motifs of commonly regulated genes showed a large diversity of motifs found in up- and down-regulated genes, and correlation analysis showed more similarity in comparison of motifs between C. jejuni and E. coli O157:H7, rather than between Col-0 and fls2 groups of the same bacterial treatment. Our work thus shows that plants are able to respond to C. jejuni infection in FLS2-dependent and independent manner.