de Oca-Mejía Marielba Montes, Castillo-Juárez Israel, Martínez-Vázquez Mariano, Soto-Hernandez Marcos, García-Contreras Rodolfo
Departamento de Bioquímica, Instituto Nacional de Cardiología 14080, México, México.
Colegio de Postgraduados, Campus Montecillo Estado de México 56230, México.
Pathog Dis. 2015 Mar;73(2):1-4. doi: 10.1093/femspd/ftu019. Epub 2014 Dec 30.
Chromobacterium violaceum is a bacterial pathogen that communicates through quorum sensing (QS), via the C6-homoserine lactone signal (C6-HSL). It is well known that the production of the pigment violacein is controlled by QS in this microorganism, in fact QS-dependent violacein production is widely used as a marker to evaluate the efficiency of potential anti-QS molecules, such as those extracted from plants. In addition to violacein, the production of chitinase is also known to be controlled by QS, but besides those two phenotypes there is a lack of experimental studies aimed to discover additional process controlled by QS in this organism; therefore, in this work the production of exoprotease, aggregation, biofilm formation, swarming motility, H2O2 resistance as well as carbon and nitrogen utilization was determined in the wild-type strain and the QS negative mutant CVO26. Our results indicate that alkaline exoprotease activity is QS controlled in this organism, that QS increases aggregation, biofilm formation, swarming, that may increase H2O2 stress tolerance, and that it may influence the utilization of several carbon and nitrogen sources.
紫色色杆菌是一种通过群体感应（QS）进行通讯的细菌病原体，其信号分子为C6-高丝氨酸内酯（C6-HSL）。众所周知，在这种微生物中，色素紫菌素的产生受群体感应控制，实际上，依赖群体感应的紫菌素产生被广泛用作评估潜在抗群体感应分子（如从植物中提取的分子）效率的标志物。除了紫菌素外，几丁质酶的产生也已知受群体感应控制，但除了这两种表型外，缺乏旨在发现该生物体中受群体感应控制的其他过程的实验研究；因此，在这项工作中，我们测定了野生型菌株和群体感应阴性突变体CVO26的胞外蛋白酶产生、聚集、生物膜形成、群游运动、对H2O2的抗性以及碳和氮的利用情况。我们的结果表明，在这种生物体中碱性胞外蛋白酶活性受群体感应控制，群体感应会增加聚集、生物膜形成、群游，这可能会增加对H2O2胁迫的耐受性，并且可能会影响几种碳源和氮源的利用。
