Houston Simon, Marshall Steven, Gomez Alloysius, Cameron Caroline E
Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada.
Department of Medicine, Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States.
Front Microbiol. 2024 Dec 11;15:1505893. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2024.1505893. eCollection 2024.
Strains of the syphilis spirochete, ssp. , group into one of two deep-branching clades: the Nichols clade or the globally dominant Street Strain 14 (SS14) clade. To date, in-depth proteome-wide analyses have focused on Nichols clade strains.
The SS14 clade reference strain (SS14) proteome was characterized via protein detection and quantification analyses using mass spectrometry, and comparison was made to the Nichols clade reference strain (Nichols) proteome.
Approximately two thirds of all proteins from SS14 were detected and quantitated, allowing confirmation of expression of 259 proteins for the first time in this strain, including 11 known/putative outer membrane proteins (OMPs). SS14 and Nichols proteome comparative analyses demonstrated similar protein expression/quantification profiles between the two strains, and showed that inter-strain amino acid sequence differences are located primarily within predicted surface-exposed regions in 16 known/putative OMPs.
This study provides the first comparative analyses of the proteomes from the SS14 and Nichols strains. The findings inform syphilis vaccine design by confirming the expression of known/predicted OMP vaccine candidates in SS14 treponemes, and via the finding that most inter-strain variable residues found in OMPs are predicted to be located in surface-exposed, host-facing regions of these proteins.
梅毒螺旋体亚种菌株分为两个深度分支进化枝之一：尼科尔斯进化枝或全球占主导地位的街道菌株14（SS14）进化枝。迄今为止，深入的全蛋白质组分析主要集中在尼科尔斯进化枝菌株上。
通过使用质谱的蛋白质检测和定量分析对SS14进化枝参考菌株（SS14）的蛋白质组进行表征，并与尼科尔斯进化枝参考菌株（尼科尔斯）的蛋白质组进行比较。
检测并定量了来自SS14的所有蛋白质中约三分之二，首次在该菌株中确认了259种蛋白质的表达，包括11种已知/推定的外膜蛋白（OMP）。SS14和尼科尔斯蛋白质组比较分析表明，这两种菌株之间的蛋白质表达/定量谱相似，并表明菌株间氨基酸序列差异主要位于16种已知/推定的OMP中预测的表面暴露区域内。
本研究首次对SS14和尼科尔斯菌株的蛋白质组进行了比较分析。这些发现通过确认已知/预测的OMP疫苗候选物在SS14密螺旋体中的表达，以及通过发现OMP中发现的大多数菌株间可变残基预计位于这些蛋白质的表面暴露、面向宿主的区域，为梅毒疫苗设计提供了信息。
