The great escape: Pseudomonas breaks out of the lung
Authors:Angelica Zhang1, Stephanie M. Rangel1, and Alan R. Hauser1,2
doi: 10.15698/mic2015.10.234
Volume 2, pp. 409 to 411, published 23/09/2015.
1 Department of Microbiology/Immunology, Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago Illinois, USA.
2 Department of Medicine, Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago Illinois, USA.
Keywords:
Pseudomonas aeruginosa, ExoS, pneumonia, dissemination
Corresponding Author(s):
Conflict of interest statement:
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
Please cite this article as:
Angelica Zhang, Stephanie M. Rangel, and Alan R. Hauser (2015). The great escape: Pseudomonas breaks out of the lung. Microbial Cell2(10): 409-411.
© 2015 Zhang et al. This is an open-access article released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are acknowledged.
Abstract:
The Gram-negative bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a major cause of hospital-acquired infections and the focus of much attention due to its resistance to many conventional antibiotics. It harbors a wide range of disease-promoting virulence factors, including a type III secretion system. Here we review our recent study of ExoS, one of the effector proteins exported by this type III secretion system. Using a mouse model of pneumonia, we showed that the ADP-ribosyltransferase (ADPRT) activity of ExoS caused formation of “fields of cell injection” (FOCI) in the lungs. These FOCI represented ExoS-injected clusters of type I pneumocytes that became compromised, leading to disruption of the pulmonary-vascular barrier and subsequent bacterial dissemination from the lungs to the bloodstream. We discuss the potential mechanisms by which these processes occur as well as the novel techniques used to study ExoS function in vivo.