Optimised chronic infection models demonstrate that siderophore 'cheating' in Pseudomonas aeruginosa is context specific.

ABSTRACT: The potential for siderophore mutants of Pseudomonas aeruginosa to attenuate virulence during infection, and the possibility of exploiting this for clinical ends, have attracted much discussion. This has largely been based on the results of in vitro experiments conducted in iron-limited growth medium, in which siderophore mutants act as social 'cheats:' increasing in frequency at the expense of the wild type to result in low-productivity, low-virulence populations dominated by mutants. We show that insights from in vitro experiments cannot necessarily be transferred to infection contexts. First, most published experiments use an undefined siderophore mutant. Whole-genome sequencing of this strain revealed a range of mutations affecting phenotypes other than siderophore production. Second,

SUBMITTER: Harrison F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5649161 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature