Dataset Information

Systematic functional analysis reveals that a set of seven genes is involved in fine-tuning of the multiple functions mediated by type IV pili in Neisseria meningitidis.

ABSTRACT: Type IV pili (Tfp), which mediate multiple phenotypes ranging from adhesion to motility, are one of the most widespread virulence factors in bacteria. However, the molecular mechanisms of Tfp biogenesis and associated functions remain poorly understood. One of the underlying reasons is that the roles played by the numerous genes involved in Tfp biology are unclear because corresponding mutants have been studied on a case-by-case basis, in different species, and using different assays, often generating heterogeneous results. Therefore, we have recently started a systematic functional analysis of the genes involved in Tfp biology in a well-characterized clinical isolate of the human pathogen Neisseria meningitidis. After previously studying 16 genes involved in Tfp biogenesis, here we report the characterization of 7 genes that are dispensable for piliation and potentially involved in Tfp biology. Using a battery of assays, we assessed piliation and each of the Tfp-linked functions in single mutants, double mutants in which filament retraction is abolished by a concurrent mutation in pilT, and strains overexpressing the corresponding proteins. This showed that each of the seven genes actually fine-tunes a Tfp-linked function(s), which brings us one step closer to a global view of Tfp biology in the meningococcus.

SUBMITTER: Brown DR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2897404 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Systematic functional analysis reveals that a set of seven genes is involved in fine-tuning of the multiple functions mediated by type IV pili in Neisseria meningitidis.

Brown Daniel R DR Helaine Sophie S Carbonnelle Etienne E Pelicic Vladimir V

Infection and immunity 20100503 7

Type IV pili (Tfp), which mediate multiple phenotypes ranging from adhesion to motility, are one of the most widespread virulence factors in bacteria. However, the molecular mechanisms of Tfp biogenesis and associated functions remain poorly understood. One of the underlying reasons is that the roles played by the numerous genes involved in Tfp biology are unclear because corresponding mutants have been studied on a case-by-case basis, in different species, and using different assays, often gene ...[more]

PMID: 20439474

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Project description:Neisseria meningitidis is a strictly human pathogen that has two facets since asymptomatic carriage can unpredictably turn into fulminant forms of infection. Meningococcal pathogenesis relies on the ability of the bacteria to break host epithelial or endothelial cellular barriers. Highly restrictive, yet poorly understood, mechanisms allow meningococcal adhesion to cells of only human origin. Adhesion of encapsulated and virulent meningococci to human cells relies on the expression of bacterial type four pili (T4P) that trigger intense host cell signalling. Among the components of the meningococcal T4P, the concomitantly expressed PilC1 and PilC2 proteins regulate pili exposure at the bacterial surface, and until now, PilC1 was believed to be specifically responsible for T4P-mediated meningococcal adhesion to human cells. Contrary to previous reports, we show that, like PilC1, the meningococcal PilC2 component is capable of mediating adhesion to human ME180 epithelial cells, with cortical plaque formation and F-actin condensation. However, PilC1 and PilC2 promote different effects on infected cells. Cellular tracking analysis revealed that PilC1-expressing meningococci caused a severe reduction in the motility of infected cells, which was not the case when cells were infected with PilC2-expressing strains. The amount of both total and phosphorylated forms of EGFR was dramatically reduced in cells upon PilC1-mediated infection. In contrast, PilC2-mediated infection did not notably affect the EGFR pathway, and these specificities were shared among unrelated meningococcal strains. These results suggest that meningococci have evolved a highly discriminative tool for differential adhesion in specific microenvironments where different cell types are present. Moreover, the fine-tuning of cellular control through the combined action of two concomitantly expressed, but distinctly regulated, T4P-associated variants of the same molecule (i.e. PilC1 and PilC2) brings a new model to light for the analysis of the interplay between pathogenic bacteria and human host cells.

Project description:To create a dataset of PSMs that does not exhibit tryptic bias, we selected PSMs with a uniform distribution of amino acids at the C-terminal peptide positions from two datasets: MassIVE-KB [Wang2018] and PROSPECT [Shouman2022]. The MassIVE-KB dataset contains 30 million PSMs and consists entirely of data generated using trypsin; hence, only a small proportion of the MassIVE-KB peptides do not end in K or R, corresponding to those that appear at the C-terminus of the corresponding protein. The PROSPECT dataset is a collection of 61 million PSMs generated from synthetic peptides. To avoid overrepresentation of some peptides in this dataset, we randomly selected at most 100 PSMs per unique peptide, similar to the processing that was done during the creation of the MassIVE-KB dataset. This pre-selection step reduced the size of the PROSPECT dataset to 12.6 million PSMs. Finally, to create a non-enzymatic dataset containing 1 million peptides, we selected 50,000 PSMs for each canonical amino acid. These PSMs were selected at random from MassIVE-KB, then supplemented as necessary from PROSPECT to obtain the desired count (see Yilmaz et al. [Yilmaz2023] Supplementary Table S1). This dataset contained PSMs from 247,859 unique peptides, which were randomly split into training, validation and test sets in the ratio 80/10/10. FTP directory contains the mgf files corresponding to train, validation and test splits. [Wang2018] M. Wang, J. Wang, J. Carver, B. Pullman, S. Won Cha, N. Bandeira, "Assembling the Community-Scale Discoverable Human Proteome", Cell Systems, Volume 7, Issue 4, 2018. [Shouman2022] O. Shouman, W. Gabriel, V. Giurcoiu, V. Sternlicht, M. Wilhelm, "PROSPECT: Labeled Tandem Mass Spectrometry Dataset for Machine Learning in Proteomics", NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks, 2022 [Yilmaz2023] M. Yilmaz*, W. Fondrie*, W. Bittremieux, R. Nelson, V. Ananth, S. Oh, and W. Noble,"Sequence-to-sequence translation from mass spectra to peptides with a transformer model", bioRxiv, 2023

Dataset Information

Systematic functional analysis reveals that a set of seven genes is involved in fine-tuning of the multiple functions mediated by type IV pili in Neisseria meningitidis.

Publications

Systematic functional analysis reveals that a set of seven genes is involved in fine-tuning of the multiple functions mediated by type IV pili in Neisseria meningitidis.

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