Staphylococcus aureus sigma B-dependent emergence of small-colony variants and biofilm production following exposure to Pseudomonas aeruginosa 4-hydroxy-2-heptylquinoline-N- oxide

BMC Microbiology

Research Article

David Lalonde Séguin¹  Gabriel Mitchell¹  François Malouin¹  Ann-Elise Asselin¹  Sophie Michaud²  Eric H Frost²  Eric Déziel³  André M Cantin⁴ 

[1] Centre d'Étude et de Valorisation de la Diversité Microbienne (CEVDM), Département de biologie, Faculté des sciences, Université de Sherbrooke, J1K 2R1, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada;Département de Microbiologie et d'Infectiologie, Faculté de médecine et des sciences de la santé, Université de Sherbrooke, J1H 5N4, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada;INRS-Institut Armand Frappier, H7V 1B7, Laval, QC, Canada;Unité de Recherche Pulmonaire, Faculté de médecine et des sciences de la santé, Université de Sherbrooke, J1H 5N4, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada;

关键词: Cystic Fibrosis;    Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane Conductance Regulator;    Cystic Fibrosis Patient;    Cystic Fibrosis Airway;    HQNO;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2180-10-33

 received in 2009-07-20, accepted in 2010-01-30,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundStaphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa are often found together in the airways of cystic fibrosis (CF) patients. It was previously shown that the P. aeruginosa exoproduct 4-hydroxy-2-heptylquinoline-N- oxide (HQNO) suppresses the growth of S. aureus and provokes the emergence of small-colony variants (SCVs). The presence of S. aureus SCVs as well as biofilms have both been associated with chronic infections in CF.ResultsWe demonstrated that HQNO stimulates S. aureus to form a biofilm in association with the formation of SCVs. The emergence of SCVs and biofilm production under HQNO exposure was shown to be dependent on the activity of the stress- and colonization-related alternative sigma factor B (SigB). Analysis of gene expression revealed that exposure of a prototypical S. aureus strain to HQNO activates SigB, which was leading to an increase in the expression of the fibronectin-binding protein A and the biofilm-associated sarA genes. Conversely, the quorum sensing accessory gene regulator (agr) system and the α-hemolysin gene were repressed by HQNO. Experiments using culture supernatants from P. aeruginosa PAO1 and a double chamber co-culture model confirmed that P. aeruginosa stimulates biofilm formation and activates SigB in a S. aureus strain isolated from a CF patient. Furthermore, the supernatant from P. aeruginosa mutants unable to produce HQNO induced the production of biofilms by S. aureus to a lesser extent than the wild-type strain only in a S. aureus SigB-functional background.ConclusionsThese results suggest that S. aureus responds to HQNO from P. aeruginosa by forming SCVs and biofilms through SigB activation, a phenomenon that may contribute to the establishment of chronic infections in CF patients.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Mitchell et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010. 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.