Iron Acquisition of Urinary Tract infection Escherichia coli Involves Pathogenicity in Caenorhabditis elegans

Microorganisms

Sin-Tian Wang¹  Chang-Shi Chen¹  Yi-Fen Ma²  Ching-Hao Teng²  Masayuki Hashimoto² 

[1] Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, College of Medicine, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 70101, Taiwan;Institute of Molecular Medicine, College of Medicine, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 70101, Taiwan;

关键词: Uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC);    Caenorhabditis elegans;    high-throughput screening;    pathogenicity assay;    iron acquisition;   

DOI  :  10.3390/microorganisms9020310

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC) is a major bacterial pathogen that causes urinary tract infections (UTIs). The mouse is an available UTI model for studying the pathogenicity; however, Caenorhabditis elegans represents as an alternative surrogate host with the capacity for high-throughput analysis. Then, we established a simple assay for a UPEC infection model with C. elegans for large-scale screening. A total of 133 clinically isolated E. coli strains, which included UTI-associated and fecal isolates, were applied to demonstrate the simple pathogenicity assay. From the screening, several virulence factors (VFs) involved with iron acquisition (chuA, fyuA, and irp2) were significantly associated with high pathogenicity. We then evaluated whether the VFs in UPEC were involved in the pathogenicity. Mutants of E. coli UTI89 with defective iron acquisition systems were applied to a solid killing assay with C. elegans. As a result, the survival rate of C. elegans fed with the mutants significantly increased compared to when fed with the parent strain. The results demonstrated, the simple assay with C. elegans was useful as a UPEC infectious model. To our knowledge, this is the first report of the involvement of iron acquisition in the pathogenicity of UPEC in a C. elegans model.

【 授权许可】

Unknown