- Volume 158, Issue 2, 2012

Lagerstroemia speciosa (Lythraceae) is a south-east Asian tree more commonly known as ‘Jarul’. Research on health benefits suggests that the L. speciosa plant contains phytomolecules that may have antioxidant, anti-diabetic and anti-obesity properties. However, antimicrobial activities have not been reported for this plant. The ability of L. speciosa fruit extract (LSFE) to antagonize cell-to-cell communication, expression of virulence genes and factors, and biofilm formation was evaluated in Pseudomonas aeruginosa strain PAO1. Our results suggested that LSFE caused downregulation of quorum sensing (QS)-related genes (las and rhl) and their respective signalling molecules, N-acylhomoserine lactones, without affecting the growth of P. aeruginosa PAO1. Significant inhibition of virulence factors: LasA protease, LasB elastase, and pyoverdin production, was also recorded. Application of LSFE to P. aeruginosa PAO1 biofilms increased bacterial susceptibility to tobramycin. These data suggest a possible role for quorum-quenching mechanisms unrelated to static or cidal effects, and also suggest that L. speciosa could serve as a cost-effective source in the development of new QS-based antibacterial drugs.

The peptide wrwycr inhibits Holliday junction resolution and is a potent antimicrobial. To study the physiological effects of wrwycr treatment on Escherichia coli cells, we partially screened the Keio collection of knockout mutants for those with increased sensitivity to wrwycr. Strains lacking part of the ferric-enterobactin (iron-bound siderophore) uptake and utilization system, parts of the enterobactin synthesis pathway, TolC (an outer-membrane channel protein) or Fur (an iron-responsive regulator) were hypersensitive to wrwycr. We provide evidence that the ΔtolC mutant was hypersensitive to wrwycr due to its reduced ability to efflux wrwycr from the cell rather than due to its export of newly synthesized enterobactin. Deleting ryhB, which encodes a small RNA involved in iron regulation, mostly relieved the wrwycr hypersensitivity of the fur and ferric-enterobactin uptake mutants, indicating that the altered regulation of a RyhB-controlled gene was at least partly responsible for the hypersensitivity of these strains. Chelatable iron in the cell, measured by electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, increased dramatically following wrwycr treatment, as did expression of Fur-repressed genes and, to some extent, mutation frequency. These incongruous results suggest that while wrwycr treatment caused accumulation of chelatable iron in the cell, iron was not available to bind to Fur. This is corroborated by the observed induction of the suf system, which assembles iron–sulfur clusters in low-iron conditions. Disruption of iron metabolism by wrwycr, in addition to its effects on DNA repair, may make it a particularly effective antimicrobial in the context of the low-iron environment of a mammalian host.

We have reported that Neisseria gonorrhoeae is extremely resistant to reactive nitrogen species (RNS) including peroxynitrite (PN). Recent literature suggests that catalase can provide protection against commercial preparations of PN. Though wild-type gonococci were shown to be highly resistant to 2 mM PN, Neisseria meningitidis and a gonococcal katA mutant were both shown to be extremely sensitive to 2 mM PN. Analysis of translational fusions to lacZ of the catalase promoters from N. gonorrhoeae and N. meningitidis demonstrated that basal katA expression from gonococci is 80-fold higher than in meningococci, though meningococcal katA retains a greater capacity to be activated by OxyR. This activation capacity was shown to be due to a single base pair difference in the −10 transcription element between the two kat promoters. PN resistance was initially shown to be associated with increasing catalase expression; however, commercial preparations of PN were later revealed to contain higher levels of contaminating hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) than expected. Removal of H2O2 from PN preparations with manganese dioxide markedly reduced PN toxicity in a gonococcal katA mutant. Simultaneous treatment with non-lethal concentrations of PN and H2O2 was highly lethal, indicating that these agents act synergistically. When treatment was separated by 5 min, high levels of bacterial killing occurred only when PN was added first. Our results suggest that killing of N. gonorrhoeae ΔkatA by commercial PN preparations is likely due to H2O2, that H2O2 is more toxic in the presence of PN, and that PN, on its own, may not be as toxic as previously believed.

Determining transcription factor (TF) recognition motifs or operator sites is central to understanding gene regulation, yet few operators have been characterized. In this study, we used a protein-binding microarray (PBM) to discover the DNA recognition sites and putative regulons for three TetR and one MarR family TFs derived from Burkholderia xenovorans, which are common to the genus Burkholderia. We also describe the development and application of a more streamlined version of the PBM technology that significantly reduced the experimental time. Despite the genus containing many pathogenically important species, only a handful of TF operator sites have been experimentally characterized for Burkholderia to date. Our study provides a significant addition to this knowledge base and illustrates some general challenges of discovering operators on a large scale for prokaryotes.