Witt Natalie, Galante Domenico, Andreotti Sandro, Abdel Glil Mostafa, Fasanella Antonio, Meierhofer David, Tomaso Herbert
Mass Spectrometry Facility, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Ihnestraße 63-73, 14195 Berlin, Germany.
Bioanalytics, Institute of Biotechnology, Technische Universität Berlin, 13355 Berlin, Germany.
Life (Basel). 2022 Oct 6;12(10):1549. doi: 10.3390/life12101549.
Anthrax is a zoonotic infection caused by the bacterium (BA). Specific identification of this pathogen often relies on targeting genes located on two extrachromosomal plasmids, which represent the major pathogenicity factors of BA. However, more recent findings show that these plasmids have also been found in other closely related species. In this study, we investigated the possibility of identifying species-specific and universally applicable marker peptides for BA. For this purpose, we applied a high-resolution mass spectrometry-based approach for 42 BA isolates. Along with the genomic sequencing data and by developing a bioinformatics data evaluation pipeline, which uses a database containing most of the publicly available protein sequences worldwide (UniParc), we were able to identify eleven universal marker peptides unique to BA. These markers are located on the chromosome and therefore, might overcome known problems, such as observable loss of plasmids in environmental species, plasmid loss during cultivation in the lab, and the fact that the virulence plasmids are not necessarily a unique feature of BA. The identified chromosomally encoded markers in this study could extend the small panel of already existing chromosomal targets and along with targets for the virulence plasmids, may pave the way to an even more reliable identification of BA using genomics- as well as proteomics-based techniques.
炭疽病是由炭疽杆菌（BA）引起的一种人畜共患感染。对这种病原体的特异性鉴定通常依赖于靶向位于两个染色体外质粒上的基因，这两个质粒代表了BA的主要致病因素。然而，最近的研究结果表明，这些质粒在其他密切相关的物种中也有发现。在本研究中，我们调查了鉴定BA物种特异性和普遍适用的标记肽的可能性。为此，我们对42株BA分离株采用了基于高分辨率质谱的方法。结合基因组测序数据，并通过开发一种生物信息学数据评估流程，该流程使用一个包含全球大部分公开可用蛋白质序列的数据库（UniParc），我们能够鉴定出11种BA特有的通用标记肽。这些标记位于染色体上，因此可能克服已知的问题，如环境物种中质粒的明显丢失、实验室培养过程中质粒的丢失，以及毒力质粒不一定是BA的独特特征这一事实。本研究中鉴定出的染色体编码标记可以扩展现有的少量染色体靶点，并与毒力质粒的靶点一起，可能为使用基于基因组学和蛋白质组学的技术更可靠地鉴定BA铺平道路。
