Project description:Escherichia coli, the common inhabitant of the mammalian intestine, exhibits considerable intraspecies genomic variation, which has been suggested to reflect adaptation to different ecological niches. Also, regulatory trade-offs, e.g., between catabolic versatility and stress protection, are thought to result in significant physiological differences between strains. For these reasons, the relevance of experimental observations made for “domesticated” E. coli strains with regard to the behaviour of this species in its natural environments is often questioned and frequently doubts are raised on the status of E. coli as a defined species. We therefore investigated the variability of important eco-physiological functions such as carbon substrate uptake and breakdown capabilities as well as stress defence mechanisms in the genomes of commensal and pathogenic E. coli strains. Furthermore, eco-physiological properties of environmental strains were compared to standard laboratory strain K-12 MG1655. Catabolic, stress protection, and carbon- and energy source transport operons showed a very low intraspecies variability in 57 commensal and pathogenic E. coli. Environmental isolates adapted to glucose-limited growth in a similar way as E. coli MG1655, namely by increasing their catabolic flexibility and by inducing high affinity substrate uptake systems. Our results indicate that the major eco-physiological properties are highly conserved in the natural population of E. coli. This questions the proposed dominant role of horizontal gene transfer for niche adaptation. Keywords: CGH, E. coli, gDNA, environmental strains, eco-physiology
Project description:Escherichia coli, the common inhabitant of the mammalian intestine, exhibits considerable intraspecies genomic variation, which has been suggested to reflect adaptation to different ecological niches. Also, regulatory trade-offs, e.g., between catabolic versatility and stress protection, are thought to result in significant physiological differences between strains. For these reasons, the relevance of experimental observations made for “domesticated” E. coli strains with regard to the behaviour of this species in its natural environments is often questioned and frequently doubts are raised on the status of E. coli as a defined species. We therefore investigated the variability of important eco-physiological functions such as carbon substrate uptake and breakdown capabilities as well as stress defence mechanisms in the genomes of commensal and pathogenic E. coli strains. Furthermore, eco-physiological properties of environmental strains were compared to standard laboratory strain K-12 MG1655. Catabolic, stress protection, and carbon- and energy source transport operons showed a very low intraspecies variability in 57 commensal and pathogenic E. coli. Environmental isolates adapted to glucose-limited growth in a similar way as E. coli MG1655, namely by increasing their catabolic flexibility and by inducing high affinity substrate uptake systems. Our results indicate that the major eco-physiological properties are highly conserved in the natural population of E. coli. This questions the proposed dominant role of horizontal gene transfer for niche adaptation. Keywords: comparative genomic hybridisation
Project description:Identification and expression analysis of microRNAs in infected larvae of the insect model Galleria mellonella with uropathogenic (UPEC) and commensal E. coli strains that are known to cause symptomatic and asymptomatic bacteriuria (ABU) in humans, respectively.
Project description:Pathogenic biofilms have been associated with persistent infections due to high resistance to antimicrobial agents while commensal biofilms often fortify host immune system. Hence, controlling biofilm formation of both pathogenic bacteria and commensal bacteria is important in bacteria-related diseases. We investigated the effect of plant flavonoids on biofilm formation of both enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli O157:H7 and three commensal E. coli K-12 strains. Phloretin abundant in apples markedly reduced E. coli O157:H7 biofilm formation without affecting the growth of planktonic cells while phloretin did not harm commensal E. coli K-12 biofilms. Also, phloretin reduced E. coli O157:H7 attachment to human colon epithelial cells. Global transcriptome analyses revealed that phloretin repressed toxin genes (hlyE and stx2), autoinducer-2 importer genes (lsrACDBF), a curli gene (csgA), and a dozens of prophage genes in E. coli O157:H7 cells. Electron microscopy confirmed that phroretin reduced the curli production in E. coli O157:H7. In addition, phloretin suppressed TNF-α-induced inflammatory response in vitro using human colonic epithelial cells. Moreover, in the trinitrobenzene sulfonic acid (TNBS)-induced rat colitis model, phloretin significantly ameliorated colon inflammation and body weight loss. Taken together, our results suggest that phloretin may act as an inhibitor of E. coli O157:H7 biofilm formation as well as anti-inflammatory agent on inflammatory bowel diseases while leaving beneficial commensal E. coli biofilm intact.
Project description:Escherichia coli is an important human pathogen, among others a cause of severe diarrhea diseases and urinary tract infections. The ability to distinguish different pathogenic E. coli subspecies is crucial for correct treatment of the infection. Characterization and quantification of clinical isolates proteomes can provide details of the organisms’ metabolism and specific virulence factors. We performed a systematic quantitative proteomic analysis on a representative selection of 16 pathogenic and 2 commensal E. coli strains, together with 5 pathogenic Shigella strains. The analysis yielded a dataset of more than 4 thousand proteins, with an average of 2 thousand proteins per strain and 980 proteins common to all strains. Statistical comparison of label-free quantitative levels of 750 proteins, which were quantified in all strains, revealed that levels of a majority of the shared proteins vary substantially among specific strains. Theses quantitative protein profiles clearly distinguished E. coli strains from Shigella and largely separated commensal E. coli strains from intestinal and extraintestinal E. coli isolates.
Project description:Proteome analysis of ony commensal E. coli strain (ST10) and two pathogenic E. coli strains (from ST131) grown with and without sorbose
Project description:62 individual Brassica napus plants of the same accession grown in the same field were expression-profiled in autumn 2016 and phenotyped extensively until harvest in spring 2017. Machine learning models were used to link gene expression to the phenotypes of individual plants, with the purpose of assessing how much phenotype information in encoded in ‘noisy’ gene expression variation among individual plants of the same background grown under the same uncontrolled field conditions. Rosette leaf 8 blades of 62 individual Brassica napus plants of the same winter-type accession (BnASSYST-120, Darmor) grown in the same field (50°58'24.9\\"N 3°46'49.1\\"E, Merelbeke, Belgium) were RNA-seq profiled. No treatments or stresses were applied, all plants were profiled individually under uncontrolled field conditions. Sown at 2016-09-08, rosette leaf 8 sampled for RNA-seq at 2016-11-28, plants harvested at 2017-06-13.
Project description:Mature tRNA pools were measured using an adaptation of YAMAT-seq (Shigematsu et al., 2017; doi:10.1093/nar/gkx005 ) and further described in (Ayan et al., 2020; doi:10.7554/eLife.57947) in 10 strain-medium combinations (all strains dervied from the model bacterium E. coli MG1655). The aim of the experiment was to investigate the effect of reducing tRNA gene copy number on mature tRNA pools in rich and poor media.
Project description:Escherichia coli, the common inhabitant of the mammalian intestine, exhibits considerable intraspecies genomic variation, which has been suggested to reflect adaptation to different ecological niches. Also, regulatory trade-offs, e.g., between catabolic versatility and stress protection, are thought to result in significant physiological differences between strains. For these reasons, the relevance of experimental observations made for âdomesticatedâ E. coli strains with regard to the behaviour of this species in its natural environments is often questioned and frequently doubts are raised on the status of E. coli as a defined species. We therefore investigated the variability of important eco-physiological functions such as carbon substrate uptake and breakdown capabilities as well as stress defence mechanisms in the genomes of commensal and pathogenic E. coli strains. Furthermore, eco-physiological properties of environmental strains were compared to standard laboratory strain K-12 MG1655. Catabolic, stress protection, and carbon- and energy source transport operons showed a very low intraspecies variability in 57 commensal and pathogenic E. coli. Environmental isolates adapted to glucose-limited growth in a similar way as E. coli MG1655, namely by increasing their catabolic flexibility and by inducing high affinity substrate uptake systems. Our results indicate that the major eco-physiological properties are highly conserved in the natural population of E. coli. This questions the proposed dominant role of horizontal gene transfer for niche adaptation. Keywords: comparative genomic hybridisation Standard approach for comparative genomic hybrisisation, 5 environmental strains were analysed on commercial E. coli MG1655 arrays (MWG), for each strains, biological replicates were done (separate LB cultures)