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Volume 9, Issue 4

Transcriptomics in serum and culture medium reveal shared and differential gene regulation in pathogenic and commensal Open Access

Abstract

colonizes the upper respiratory tract of healthy pigs at high abundance but can also cause opportunistic respiratory and systemic disease. Disease-associated reference strains are well studied, but less is known about commensal lineages. It is not known what mechanisms enable some lineages to cause disease while others persist as commensal colonizers, or to what extent gene expression in disease-associated and commensal lineages diverge. In this study we compared the transcriptomes of 21 . strains grown in active porcine serum and Todd–Hewitt yeast broth. These strains included both commensal and pathogenic strains, including several strains of sequence type (ST) 1, which is responsible for most cases of human disease and is considered to be the most pathogenic lineage. We sampled the strains during their exponential growth phase and mapped RNA sequencing reads to the corresponding strain genomes. We found that the transcriptomes of pathogenic and commensal strains with large genomic divergence were unexpectedly conserved when grown in active porcine serum, but that regulation and expression of key pathways varied. Notably, we observed strong variation of expression across media of genes involved in capsule production in pathogens, and of the agmatine deiminase system in commensals. ST1 strains displayed large differences in gene expression between the two media compared to strains from other clades. Their capacity to regulate gene expression across different environmental conditions may be key to their success as zoonotic pathogens.

  • Received:
  • Accepted:
  • Published Online:
Keyword(s): commensal , gene regulation , pathogen , strain comparison , Streptococcus suis , transcriptomics and virulence
Funding
This study was supported by the:
  • Horizon 2020 (Award 727966)
    • Principle Award Recipient: JerryM. Wells
© 2023 The Authors
  • This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. This article was made open access via a Publish and Read agreement between the Microbiology Society and the corresponding author’s institution.
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2023-04-27
2024-05-04
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Transcriptomics in serum and culture medium reveal shared and differential gene regulation in pathogenic and commensal Streptococcus suis
M Gen 9, 000992 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1099/mgen.0.000992
/content/journal/mgen/10.1099/mgen.0.000992
/content/journal/mgen/10.1099/mgen.0.000992
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