Project description:Purpose: Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in patients with cystic fibrosis (CF). We provide an insight to the DNA auxotrophy of P. aeruginosa PASS4 isolate. Better understanding of P. aeruginosa adaptations in the CF lung environment can have a great impact in the development of specialised treatment regimes aimed at the eradications of P. aeruginosa infections. Methods: P. aeruginosa strains PAO1 and PASS4 were grown in minimal medium with either L-Asparagine or DNA as a carbon source, in biological triplicates. RNA was extracted and sequenced on Illumina HiSeq 1000 platform. The sequence reads that passed quality filters were analyzed using EdgePro and DESeq packages, as well as the Rockhopper tool. Results: We mapped > 10 million paired sequence reads per sample to the genome of P. aeruginosa PAO1 and identified a total of 576 genes differentially expressed by PASS4 when grown in DNA (P value < 0.01, log2 fold-change 1< to < -1), with 322 genes upregulated and 254 genes downregulated. There were a total of 423 genes differentially expressed by PAO1 when grown in DNA (P value < 0.01, log2 fold-change 1< to <-1), with 359 genes upregulated and 64 genes downregulated . A total of 129 transcripts displayed similar expression patterns in both organisms, with 112 being upregulated and 17 down-regulated. Conclusions: Our study identified that P. aeruginosa PASS4 was a purine auxotroph. Purine auxotropy may represent a viable microbial strategy for adaptation to DNA rich environments such as the CF lung.
Project description:Taxonomic outliers of Pseudomonas aeruginosa recently emerged as infectious for humans. Here we present the first analysis of a hyper-virulent isolate that cause hemorrhagic pneumonia. We demonstrated that, in two sequential clones CLJ1 and CLJ3 recovered from a patient with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease undergoing antibiotic therapy, insertion of a mobile genetic element into the P. aeruginosa chromosome affected major virulence-associated phenotypes and led to increased resistance to antibiotics used to treat the patient. Our work reveals insertion sequences as major players in enhancing the pathogenic potential of a P. aeruginosa taxonomic outlier by modulating both the virulence and resistance to antimicrobials. This also explains the ability of this bacterium to adapt to an infected host and cause a serious disease.
Project description:Comparative analysis of tobacco leaves transcriptomes unveils carotenoid pathway potentially determined the characteristics of aroma compounds in different environmental regions. Tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) is a sensitive crop to environmental changes, and a tobacco with unique volatile aroma fractions always formed in specific ecological conditions. In order to investigate the differential expressed genes caused by environmental changes and reveal the formation mechanism of characteristics of tobacco in three different aroma tobacco regions of Guizhou Province, Agilent tobacco microarray was adapted for transcriptome comparison of tobacco leaves in medium aroma tobacco region Kaiyang and light aroma tobacco regions Weining and Tianzhu. Results showed that there was big difference among the gene expression profiles of tobacco leaves in different environmental conditions. A total of 517 differential expressed genes (DEGs) between Weining and Tianzhu were identified, while 733 and 1,005 genes differentially expressed between Longgang and another two tobacco regions Weining and Tianzhu, respectively. Compared with Longgang, up-regulated genes in Weining and Tianzhu were likely involved in secondary metabolism pathways, especially carotenoid pathway, including PHYTOENE SYNTHASE, PHYTOENE DEHYDROGENASE, LYCOPENE ε-CYCLASE, CAROTENOID β-HYDROXYLASE and CAROTENOID CLEAVAGE DIOXYGENASE 1 genes, while most down-regulated genes played important roles in response to temperature and light radiation, such as heat shock proteins. Gene Ontology and MapMan analyses demonstrated that the DEGs among different environmental regions were significantly enriched in light reaction of photosystem II, response of stimulus and secondary metabolism, suggesting they played crucial roles in environmental adaptation and accumulation of aroma compounds in tobacco plants. Through comprehensive transcriptome comparison, we not only identified several stress response genes in tobacco leaves from different environmental regions but also highlighted the importance of carotenoid pathway genes for characteristics of aroma compounds in specific growing regions. Our study primarily laid the foundation for further understanding the molecular mechanism of environmental adaptation of tobacco plants and molecular regulation of aroma substances in tobacco leaves.
Project description:Although Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic pathogen that does not often naturally infect alternate hosts such as plants, the plant-P. aeruginosa model has become a widely recognized system for identifying new virulence determinants and studying pathogenesis of this organism. Here we examine how both host factors and P. aeruginosa PAO1 gene expression are affected in planta after infiltration into incompatible and compatible cultivars of tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.) Nicotiana tabacum has a resistance gene (N) against tobacco mosaic virus; and although resistance to PAO1 infection correlated to the presence of a dominant N-gene, our data suggests that it is not a factor in resistance against Pseudomonas. We did observe that the resistant tobacco cultivar had higher basal levels of salicylic acid, and a stronger salicylic acid response upon infiltration of PAO1. Salicylic acid acts as a signal to activate defense responses in plants, limiting the spread of the pathogen and preventng access to nutrients. It has also been shown to have direct virulence modulating effects on P. aeruginosa. We also examined host effects on the pathogen by analyzing global gene expression profiles of bacteria removed from the intracellular fluid of the two plant hosts. We discovered that the availability of micronutrients, particularly sulfate and Pi, are important factors in in planta pathogenesis, and that the amounts of these nutrients made available to the bacteria may in turn have an effect on virulence gene expression. Indeed, there are several reports suggesting that P. aeruginosa virulence is influenced in mammalian hosts by the availability of iron and by levels of O2. Experiment Overall Design: Pseudomonas aeruginosa cells were removed from leaf tissue 24 hours post-infiltration and RNA was directly extracted from these cells. Comparisons are between cells removed from a susceptible cultivar of Nicotiana tabacum (cv. Samsun) and a resistant cultivar (cv. Xanthi). Three biological replicates per cultivar were analyzed.