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Volume 167, Issue 8

Vfr or CyaB promote the expression of the pore-forming toxin operon in ATCC 9027 without increasing its virulence in mice Free

Abstract

is a wide-spread γ-proteobacterium that produces the biosurfactant rhamnolipid that has a great commercial value due to excellent properties of low toxicity and high biodegradability. However, this bacterium is an opportunist pathogen that constitutes an important health hazard due to its production of virulence-associated traits and its high antibiotic resistance. Thus, it is highly desirable to have a non-virulent strain for rhamnolipid production. It has been reported that strain ATCC 9027 is avirulent in mouse models of infection, and it is still able to produce rhamnolipid. Thus, it has been proposed to be suitable for it industrial production, since it encodes a defective LasR quorum sensing (QS) transcriptional regulator that is the head of this regulatory network. However, the restoration of virulence factor production by overexpression of (the gene encoding a QS-transcriptional regulator which is under the transcriptional control of LasR) is not sufficient to restore its virulence in mice. It is desirable to obtain a deeper understanding of ATCC 9027 attenuated-virulence phenotype and to assess the safety of this strain to be used at an industrial scale. In this work we determined whether increasing the expression of the pore-forming toxin encoded by the operon in strain ATCC 9027 had an impact on its virulence using and mouse models of infections. We increased the expression of the operon by overexpressing from a plasmid its transcriptional activator Vfr or of the Vfr ligand cyclic AMP produced by CyaB. We found that in ATCC 9027/pUCP24- and ATCC 9027/pUCP24- gained a virulent phenotype, but these strains remained avirulent in murine models of infection. These results reinforce the possibility of using ATCC 9027 for industrial biosurfactants production.

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  • Accepted:
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Keyword(s): exolysin ExlA , Pseudomonas aeruginosa virulence and Vfr
Funding
This study was supported by the:
  • université grenoble alpes (Award ISBG; UMS 3518 CNRS-CEA-UGA-EMBL)
    • Principle Award Recipient: InaAtree
  • université grenoble alpes (Award Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale (Team FRM 2017, DEQ20170336705)
    • Principle Award Recipient: InaAtree
  • université grenoble alpes (Award ANR-10-INBS-0005-02)
    • Principle Award Recipient: InaAtree
  • dirección general de asuntos del personal académico, universidad nacional autónoma de méxico (Award IN201819)
    • Principle Award Recipient: GloriaSoberón-Chávez
© 2021 The Authors
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2021-08-23
2024-05-04
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Vfr or CyaB promote the expression of the pore-forming toxin exlBA operon in Pseudomonas aeruginosa ATCC 9027 without increasing its virulence in mice
Microbiology 167, 001083 (2021); https://doi.org/10.1099/mic.0.001083
/content/journal/micro/10.1099/mic.0.001083
/content/journal/micro/10.1099/mic.0.001083
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