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Activity and Impact on Resistance Development of Two Antivirulence Fluoropyrimidine Drugs in Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

ABSTRACT: The rise in antibiotic resistance among bacterial pathogens has prompted the exploitation of alternative antibacterial strategies, such as antivirulence therapy. By inhibiting virulence traits, antivirulence drugs are expected to lessen pathogenicity without affecting bacterial growth, therefore avoiding the spread of resistance. However, some studies argued against this assumption, and the lack of antivirulence drugs in clinical use hampers the empirical assessment of this concept. Here we compared the mode of action and range of activity of two drugs which have been proposed for repurposing as quorum sensing and pyoverdine inhibitors in the human pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa: the anticancer drug 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) and the antimycotic drug 5-fluorocytosine (5-FC), respectively. The effect on bacterial growth, emergence and spread of resistance, and activity against clinical isolates were assessed. Our results confirm that 5-FU has growth inhibitory activity on reference strains and can rapidly select for spontaneous resistant mutants with loss-of-function mutations in the upp gene, responsible for uracil conversion into UMP. These mutants were also insensitive to the anti-pyoverdine effect of 5-FC. Conversely, 5-FC did not cause relevant growth inhibition, likely because of poor enzymatic conversion into 5-FU by cytosine deaminase. However, coculturing experiments showed that 5-FU resistant mutants can outcompete sensitive cells in mixed populations, in the presence of not only 5-FU but also 5-FC. Moreover, we observed that serial passages of wild-type cells in 5-FC-containing medium leads to the appearance and spread of 5-FC insensitive sub-populations of 5-FU resistant cells. The different effect on growth of 5-FU and 5-FC was overall conserved in a large collection of cystic fibrosis (CF) isolates, corresponding to different infection stages and antibiotic resistance profiles, although high variability was observed among strains. Notably, this analysis also revealed a significant number of pyoverdine-deficient isolates, whose proportion apparently increases over the course of the CF infection. This study demonstrates that the efficacy of an antivirulence drug with no apparent effect on growth can be significantly influenced by the emergence of insensitive mutants, and highlights the importance of the assessment of resistance-associated fitness cost and activity on clinical isolates for the development of "resistance-proof" antivirulence drugs.

SUBMITTER: Imperi F

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6422106 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Activity and Impact on Resistance Development of Two Antivirulence Fluoropyrimidine Drugs in <i>Pseudomonas aeruginosa</i>.

Imperi Francesco F Fiscarelli Ersilia V EV Visaggio Daniela D Leoni Livia L Visca Paolo P

Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology 20190311

The rise in antibiotic resistance among bacterial pathogens has prompted the exploitation of alternative antibacterial strategies, such as antivirulence therapy. By inhibiting virulence traits, antivirulence drugs are expected to lessen pathogenicity without affecting bacterial growth, therefore avoiding the spread of resistance. However, some studies argued against this assumption, and the lack of antivirulence drugs in clinical use hampers the empirical assessment of this concept. Here we comp ...[more]

PMID: 30915278

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Project description:An antivirulence approach targets bacterial virulence rather than cell viability in the antibiotic approach that can readily lead to drug resistance. Opportunistic human pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa produces a variety of virulence factors, and biofilm cells of this bacterium are much more resistant to antibiotics than planktonic cells. To identify novel inorganic antivirulence compounds, the dual screenings of thirty-six metal ions were performed to identify that zinc ions and ZnO nanoparticle inhibited the pyocyanin production and biofilm formation in P. aeruginosa without affecting the growth of planktonic cells. Moreover, zinc ion and ZnO nanoparticle markedly reduced the production of 2-heptyl-3-hydroxy-4(1H)-quinolone and siderophore pyochelin, while increased the production of another sideropore pyoverdine and swarming motility. Further, zinc ion and ZnO nanoparticle clearly suppressed hemolytic activity in P. aeruginosa. Transcriptome analyses showed that ZnO nanoparticle induced zinc cation efflux pump czc operon, porin genes (oprD and opdT), and Pseudomonas type III repressor A ptrA, while repressed pyocyanin-related phz operon, which partially explains the phenotypic changes. Overall, ZnO nanoparticle is a potential candidate for use in an antivirulence approach against persistent P. aeruginosa infection. P. aeruginosa Genechip Genome Array (Affymetrix, P/N 900339) was used in order to study the cells after the addition of ZnO nanoparticles. DNA microarray analysis with one biological replicate was performed with an Affymetrix system. P. aeruginosa was inoculated in 25 ml of LB medium in 250 ml shaker flasks with overnight cultures (1 : 100 dilution). Cells were cultured for 5 h with shaking at 250 rpm with and without ZnO nanoparticles (1 mM). Before sample collection, RNase inhibitor (RNAlater, Ambion, TX, USA) was added, and the cells were immediately chilled with dry ice and 95% ethanol (to prevent RNA degradation) for 30 s before centrifugation at 16,000 g for 2 min. The cell pellets were immediately frozen with dry ice and stored at –80°C. Total RNA was isolated using a Qiagen RNeasy mini Kit (Valencia, CA, USA).

Dataset Information

Activity and Impact on Resistance Development of Two Antivirulence Fluoropyrimidine Drugs in Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Publications

Activity and Impact on Resistance Development of Two Antivirulence Fluoropyrimidine Drugs in <i>Pseudomonas aeruginosa</i>.

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