RssAB Controls Virulence and Pathogenesis in Serratia marcescens
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Lin, Chuan-Sheng
Abstract
Serratia marcescens, as an important opportunistic pathogen, presents different multicellular behaviors like swarming and biofilm and possesses many virulence factors to adapt to diverse environments. However, the underlying mechanism of coordinating multicellularity, virulence expression, and pathogenesis of S. marcescens is unclear. Here, we show that two component system RssAB acts as an antivurlence modulator and inactivation of rssBA leads to hypervirulence phenotype of S. marcescens compared with wild type strain in acute pneumonia model of rat. Furthermore, RssAB inversely regulates swarming motility and early biofilm formation accompanied with contrary of expression of dominant virulence factor hemolysin ShlA. Associated with precocious swarming and defect in early biofilm formation, deletion of rssBA causes S. marcescens elevated hemolysin production concomitant with rising cytotoxicity and invasion against to human bronchial epithelial cell owing to derepression of flhDC in transcription level. Furthermore, in sublethal pneumonia model, we find that RssAB determine the capability of S. marcscens to cause systemic infection through modulating hemolysin. Without RssAB, this fine tuning in host-pathogen balance will lose and be toward to hypervirulent phenotypes during S. marcescens infection. We propose that S. marcescens utilizes RssAB to coordinate different multicellular behaviors and moderate virulence factor expression.
Subjects
Serratia marcescens
swarming
biofilm
multicellularity
hemolysin
virulence
pathogenesis
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