Description:
<jats:p>
<jats:italic>Campylobacter jejuni</jats:italic>’s flagellar locomotion is controlled by eleven chemoreceptors. Assessment of the distribution of the relevant chemoreceptor genes in the <jats:italic>C. jejuni</jats:italic> genomes deposited in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database led to the identification of two previously unknown <jats:italic>tlp</jats:italic> genes and a <jats:italic>tlp5</jats:italic> pseudogene. These two chemoreceptor genes share the same locus in the <jats:italic>C. jejuni</jats:italic> genome with <jats:italic>tlp4</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>tlp11</jats:italic>, but the gene region encoding the periplasmic ligand binding domain differs significantly from other chemoreceptor genes. Hence, they were named <jats:italic>tlp12</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>tlp13</jats:italic>.</jats:p>
<jats:p>Consequently, it was of interest to study their distribution in <jats:italic>C. jejuni</jats:italic> subpopulations of different clonality, and their cooccurrence with the eleven previously reported chemoreceptor genes. Therefore, the presence of all <jats:italic>tlp</jats:italic> genes was detected by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in 292 multilocus sequence typing (MLST)-typed <jats:italic>C. jejuni</jats:italic> isolates from different hosts.</jats:p>
<jats:p>The findings show interesting trends: <jats:italic>Tlp4</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>tlp11</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>tlp12</jats:italic>, and <jats:italic>tlp13</jats:italic> appeared to be mutually exclusive and cooccur in a minor subset of isolates. <jats:italic>Tlp4</jats:italic> was found to be present in only 33.56% of all tested isolates and was significantly less often detected in turkey isolates. <jats:italic>Tlp11</jats:italic> was tested positive in only 17.8% of the isolates, while <jats:italic>tlp12</jats:italic> was detected in 29.5% of all isolates, and <jats:italic>tlp13</jats:italic> was found to be present in 38.7%.</jats:p>