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Identification of DraRS in C. difficile, a two-component regulatory system that responds to lipid II interacting antibiotics

ABSTRACT: Clostridioides difficile is a Gram-positive opportunistic pathogen that results in 220,000 infections, 12,000 deaths, and upwards of $1 billion in medical costs in the US each year. C. difficile is highly resistant to a variety of antibiotics, but we have a poor understanding of how C. difficile senses and responds to antibiotic stress, and how such sensory systems affect clinical outcomes. There has been recent interest in using a daptomycin analog, Surotomycin, to treat C. difficile infections. We have identified a spontaneous C. difficile mutant that displays increased daptomycin resistance. We performed whole-genome sequencing that this mutant possessed a nonsense mutation, S605*, in draS which encodes a putative sensor histidine kinase of a two-component system (TCS). The draSS605* mutant has approximately a 4-8-fold increase in daptomycin MIC compared to WT. We found that expression of constitutively active DraRD54E in WT increases daptomycin resistance 8-16-fold and increases bacitracin resistance ~4-fold. We found that a selection of lipid II inhibiting compounds leads to increased activity of the luciferase-based reporter, PdraR-sLucopt including vancomycin, bacitracin, ramoplanin, and daptomycin. Using RNA-seq we identified the DraRS regulon. Interestingly, we found that DraRS can induce expression of the previously identified hex locus required for synthesis of a novel glycolipid produced in C. difficile. Our data suggest that induction of the hex locus by DraR explains some, but not all, of the DraR-induced daptomycin and bacitracin resistance.

ORGANISM(S): Clostridioides difficile

PROVIDER: GSE234961 | GEO | 2023/06/17

REPOSITORIES: GEO

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Project description:Regulatory RNAs (sRNAs) are now considered as major players in many physiological and adaptive responses in pathogenic bacteria. sRNAs have been extensively studied in Gram-negative bacteria, but less information is available in Gram-positive pathogens. There is a spread of multidrug-resistant (MDR) opportunistic organisms, grouped as “ESKAPE” pathogens, which comprise enterococci, a leading cause of hospital-acquired infections and outbreaks with emergence of MDR isolates, especially vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium (VREF). Note that no information about sRNA expression is known in this major opportunistic pathogen. By transcriptomic and genomic analyses using E. faecium Aus0004 reference strain, 249 transcribed IGRs, including sRNA candidates, were detected and, using a series of cut-offs, this set was lowered down to 54 sRNAs while 7 that were predicted based on comparative sequence analysis. RNA-seq was performed with and without subinhibitory concentrations (SIC) of daptomycin, a cyclic lipopeptide antibiotic used for VREF infections. Under daptomycin SIC exposure, 260 genes (9.1% of the genome) had a significant alteration of expression including 80 upregulated genes and 180 downregulated genes. Among the repressed genes, a large proportion (55%) coded for proteins involved in carbohydrate and transport metabolism. Also, we focused on the 9 sRNAs exhibiting the highest expression, and all of them were confirmed as expressed along bacterial growth by Northern blots and qPCR. Out of these 9 sRNAs, four had significantly lower or higher expression in the presence of daptomycin SIC, and therefore responded to antibiotic exposure. Finally, we also tested the expression of these 9 sRNAs in a collection of isogenic Aus0004 mutants with increasing levels of daptomycin resistance, and we observed by qPCR that some sRNAs had a significantly modified expression in daptomycin resistance mutants. It highlights the significant implication of some of the E. faecium sRNAs in the early steps of the development of daptomycin resistance. This is the first experimental genome-wide sRNA identification in Gram-positive E. faecium, a leading cause of hospital acquired infections.

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Identification of DraRS in C. difficile, a two-component regulatory system that responds to lipid II interacting antibiotics

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