NudC Nudix hydrolase from Pseudomonas syringae, but not its counterpart from Pseudomonas aeruginosa, is a novel regulator of intracellular redox balance required for growth, motility and biofilm formation

Interplay between bacterial 5'-NAD-RNA decapping hydrolase NudC and DEAD-box RNA helicase CsdA in stress responses

IMPORTANCE

Non-canonical 5'-caps removing RNA hydrolase NudC, along with stress-responsive RNA helicase CsdA, is crucial for 5'-NAD-RNA decapping and bacterial movement.

Individual Nudix hydrolases affect diverse features of Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Nudix proteins catalyze the hydrolysis of pyrophosphate bonds in a variety of substrates and are ubiquitous in all domains of life. The genome of an important opportunistic human pathogen, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, encodes multiple Nudix proteins. To determine the role of nine Nudix hydrolases of the P. aeruginosa PAO1161 strain in its fitness, virulence or antibiotic resistance mutants devoid of individual enzymes were constructed and analyzed for growth rate, motility, biofilm formation, pyocyanin production, and susceptibility to oxidative stress and different antibiotics. The potential effect on bacterial virulence was studied using the Caenorhabditis elegans-P. aeruginosa infection model. Of the nine mutants tested, five had an altered phenotype in comparison with the wild-type strain. The ΔPA3470, ΔPA3754, and ΔPA4400 mutants showed increased pyocyanin production, were more resistant to the β-lactam antibiotic piperacillin, and were more sensitive to killing by H2 O2 . In addition, ΔPA4400 and ΔPA5176 had impaired swarming motility and were less virulent for C. elegans. The ΔPA4841 had an increased sensitivity to oxidative stress. These changes were reversed by providing the respective nudix gene in trans indicating that the observed phenotype alterations were indeed due to the lack of the particular Nudix protein.

Nudix-type RNA pyrophosphohydrolase provides homeostasis of virulence factor pyocyanin and functions as a global regulator in Pseudomonas aeruginosa

The PA0336 protein from Pseudomonas aeruginosa belongs to the family of widely distributed Nudix pyrophosphohydrolases, which catalyze the hydrolysis of pyrophosphate bonds in a variety of nucleoside diphosphate derivatives. The amino acid sequence of the PA0336 protein is highly similar to that of the RppH Nudix RNA pyrophosphohydrolase from Escherichia coli, which removes pyrophosphate from 5'-end of triphosphorylated RNA transcripts. Trans-complementation experiments showed that the P. aeruginosa enzyme can functionally substitute for RppH in E. coli cells indicating that, similar to RppH, the Pseudomonas hydrolase mediates RNA turnover in vivo. In order to elucidate the biological significance of the PA0336 protein in Pseudomonas cells, a PA0336 mutant strain was constructed. The mutated strain considerably increased level of the virulence factor pyocyanin compared to wild type, suggesting that PA0336 could be involved in downregulation of P. aeruginosa pathogenicity. This phenotype was reversed by complementation with the wild type but not catalytically inactive PA0336, indicating that the catalytic activity was indispensable for its biological function. Pathogenesis tests in Caenorhabditis elegans showed that the PA0336 mutant of P. aeruginosa was significantly more virulent than the parental strain, confirming further that the P. aeruginosa RNA pyrophosphohydrolase PA0336 modulates bacterial pathogenesis by down-regulating production of virulence-associated factors. To study the role of PA0336 further, transcriptomes of the PA0336 mutant and the wild-type strain were compared using RNA sequencing. The level of 537 transcripts coding for proteins involved in a variety of cellular processes such as replication, transcription, translation, central metabolism and pathogenesis, was affected by the lack of PA0336. These results indicate that the PA0336 RNA pyrophosphohydrolase functions as a global regulator that influences many of transcripts including those involved in P. aeruginosa virulence.

Redox-Sensitive MarR Homologue BifR from Burkholderia thailandensis Regulates Biofilm Formation

Biofilm formation by pathogenic Burkholderia species is a serious complication as it renders the bacteria resistant to antibiotics and host defenses. Using B. thailandensis, we report here a novel redox-sensitive member of the multiple antibiotic resistance regulator (MarR) protein family, BifR, which represses biofilm formation. BifR is encoded as part of the emrB-bifR operon; emrB-bifR is divergent to ecsC, which encodes a putative LasA protease. In Pseudomonas aeruginosa, LasA has been implicated in virulence by contributing to cleavage of elastase. BifR repressed the expression of ecsC and emrB-bifR, and expression was further repressed under oxidizing conditions. BifR bound two sites in the intergenic region between ecsC and emrB-bifR with nanomolar affinity under both reducing and oxidizing conditions; however, oxidized BifR formed a disulfide-linked dimer-of-dimers, a covalent linkage that was absent in BifR-C104A in which the redox-active cysteine was replaced with alanine. BifR also repressed an operon encoding enzymes required for synthesis of phenazine antibiotics, which function as alternate respiratory electron receptors, and inactivation of bifR resulted in enhanced biofilm formation. Taken together, our data suggest that BifR functions to control LasA production and expression of genes involved in biofilm formation, in part by regulating synthesis of alternate electron acceptors that promote survival in the oxygen-limiting environment of a biofilm. The correlation between increased repression of emrB-bifR under oxidative conditions and the formation of a covalently linked BifR dimer-of-dimers suggests that BifR may modulate gene activity in response to cellular redox state.