Review
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Oct 28, 2015; 21(40): 11411-11427
Published online Oct 28, 2015. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v21.i40.11411
Tight junction disruption: Helicobacter pylori and dysregulation of the gastric mucosal barrier
Tyler J Caron, Kathleen E Scott, James G Fox, Susan J Hagen
Tyler J Caron, Kathleen E Scott, Susan J Hagen, Department of Surgery, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02215, United States
Tyler J Caron, Kathleen E Scott, James G Fox, Division of Comparative Medicine, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States
Author contributions: Caron TJ and Scott KE contributed equally to this work; all authors wrote or reviewed the article.
Supported by Department of Surgery funds, BIDMC and NIH No. P30 DK034854 (SJH), No. R01 CA093405, No. P30 ES002109, No. R01 OD011141, and No. P01 CA028842 (JGF); NIH No. T32 OD0109978 (JGF, to Dr. Caron and Dr. Scott).
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors have no conflicts of interest.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Susan J Hagen, PhD, Department of Surgery, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, E/RW-871, 330 Brookline Avenue, Boston, MA 01125, United States. shagen@bidmc.harvard.edu
Telephone: +1-617-6675308 Fax: +1-617-9755562
Received: May 11, 2015
Peer-review started: May 14, 2015
First decision: June 2, 2015
Revised: June 26, 2015
Accepted: September 30, 2015
Article in press: September 30, 2015
Published online: October 28, 2015
Processing time: 164 Days and 23.2 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Tight junction dysfunction is a risk factor for cancer development during Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) infection. The recent identification of numerous barrier-forming claudins has greatly improved our understanding of properties that regulate selective permeation across the tight junction in general, but little is known about the role of claudins in the stomach, or in H. pylori infection. In this article, we review the current state of knowledge on stomach tight junction composition and organization, discuss the details of claudin expression in various species and in cultured gastric cells, and discuss the implications of tight junction dysregulation in gastric cancer pathogenesis.