The impact of the competence quorum sensing system on Streptococcus pneumoniaebiofilms varies depending on the experimental model

BMC Microbiology

Research Article

Francesco Iannelli¹  Luciana Gualdi¹  Gianni Pozzi¹  Susanna Ricci¹  Lorenzo Di Meola¹  Marco R Oggioni¹  Claudia Trappetti²  Prashant Jain³  Cindy C Korir³  Paul Edmonds³ 

[1] Dipartimento di Biotecnologie, LAMMB, Policlinico Le Scotte (lotto 5 piano 1), Universita di Siena, 53100, Siena, Italy;Dipartimento di Biotecnologie, LAMMB, Policlinico Le Scotte (lotto 5 piano 1), Universita di Siena, 53100, Siena, Italy;Research Centre for Infectious Diseases, School of Molecular and Biomedical Science, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 5005, Australia;School of Biology, Georgia Institute of Technology, 310 Ferst Drive, 30332, Atlanta, Georgia, USA;

关键词: Sialic Acid;    Planktonic Cell;    Competence Gene;    Competence System;    Competence Stimulate Peptide;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2180-11-75

 received in 2010-11-18, accepted in 2011-04-14,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundDifferent models for biofilm in Streptococcus pneumoniae have been described in literature. To permit comparison of experimental data, we characterised the impact of the pneumococcal quorum-sensing competence system on biofilm formation in three models. For this scope, we used two microtiter and one continuous culture biofilm system.ResultsIn both microtiter models the competence system influences stability and structure of biofilm in the late attachment phase and synthetic competence stimulating peptide (CSP) restored wild type phenotypes in the comC mutants unable to produce the peptide. Early attachment of single cells to well bottoms was found for both systems to be competence independent, while later phases, including microcolony formation correlated to an intact competence system. The continuous culture biofilm model was not affected by mutations in the competence locus, but deletion of capsule had a significant impact in this model.ConclusionsSince biofilm remains a largely uncharacterised multi-parameter phenotype it appears to be advisable to exploit more than one model in order to draw conclusion of possible relevance of specific genotypes on pneumococcal physiology.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Trappetti et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.