Nguyen To Nguyen Thi, Howells Gareth, Short Francesca L
Department of Microbiology, Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia.
PLoS Pathog. 2025 Sep 15;21(9):e1013499. doi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1013499. eCollection 2025 Sep.
The bacterial pathogen Klebsiella pneumoniae is a serious public health threat due to its propensity to develop antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the emergence of hypervirulent strains able to cause community-acquired infections, and the more recent development of convergent strains that exhibit both traits. Pathogenesis in K. pneumoniae is attributed to a range of largely horizontally-acquired virulence or fitness factors that collectively mediate immune evasion, attachment, intermicrobial competition and nutrition in different niches within the host. An outstanding research question is how expression of these factors is coordinated during infection, and how this regulatory control varies in genomically distinct lineages. Here we review recent progress in understanding the regulators and networks that control K. pneumoniae virulence or host fitness factor expression, discuss the role of plasmid-chromosome regulatory crosstalk in pathogenesis, and explore the potential of new global approaches to enhance our understanding. This knowledge will be instrumental in accurately predicting virulence from genome sequence in new emergent K. pneumoniae lineages, in order to track and manage this priority pathogen.
细菌病原体肺炎克雷伯菌是一种严重的公共卫生威胁，因为它易于产生抗菌耐药性（AMR），出现了能够引起社区获得性感染的高毒力菌株，以及最近出现的兼具这两种特性的趋同菌株。肺炎克雷伯菌的发病机制归因于一系列主要通过水平获得的毒力或适应性因子，这些因子共同介导宿主内不同生态位的免疫逃避、附着、微生物间竞争和营养获取。一个突出的研究问题是这些因子在感染过程中的表达如何协调，以及这种调控控制在基因组不同的谱系中如何变化。在这里，我们综述了在理解控制肺炎克雷伯菌毒力或宿主适应性因子表达的调节因子和网络方面的最新进展，讨论了质粒 - 染色体调节串扰在发病机制中的作用，并探索了新的全局方法在增强我们理解方面的潜力。这些知识将有助于从新出现的肺炎克雷伯菌谱系的基因组序列中准确预测毒力，以便追踪和管理这种重点病原体。
