Abstract
Pyocyanin produced by Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a key virulence factor that often causes heavy damages to airway and lung in patients. Conversion of phenazine-1-carboxylic acid to pyocyanin involves an extrametabolic pathway that contains two enzymes encoded, respectively, by phzM and phzS. In this study, with construction of the rpoS-deficient mutant, we first found that although phenazine production increased, pyocyanin produced in the mutant YTΔrpoS was fourfold much higher than that in the wild-type strain YT. To investigate this issue, we constructed phzM-lacZ fusion on a vector and on the chromosome. By quantifying β-galactosidase activities, we confirmed that expression of the phzM was up-regulated when the rpoS gene was inactivated. However, no changes occurred in the expression of phzS and phzH when the rpoS was knocked out. Taken together, overproduction of the SAM-dependent methyltransferase (PhzM) might contribute to the increased pyocyanin in the absence of RpoS in P. aeruginosa.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Stephan Heeb (the University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom) for his gifts of plasmid pME6010 and pME6522, Stephen Perle (University of Bridgeport, Connecticut, the United States) for his help in preparation and revision of this manuscript.
Funding
This study was financially supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31260080 and 31571997).
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Performed the experiments: WK, KL, and ZK; quantified phenazines and analyzed the data: HM, YY, and XX; prepared and wrote the manuscript: YZ and CL; conceived and designed the experiments: CX and GY.
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As all experiments in this study did not involve any animals or human bodies, ethics approval was not sought.
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Communicated by Erko Stackebrandt.
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Wang, K., Kai, L., Zhang, K. et al. Overexpression of phzM contributes to much more production of pyocyanin converted from phenazine-1-carboxylic acid in the absence of RpoS in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Arch Microbiol 202, 1507–1515 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-020-01837-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-020-01837-8