Salmonella typhimurium TnphoA mutants with increased sensitivity to biological and chemical detergents.

Salmonella typhimurium is a ubiquitous pathogenic bacterium able to sustain the environmental conditions of the gastrointestinal tract, including biliary salts. To understand the mechanisms involved in bile salt resistance and, more generally, detergent resistance, we investigated S. typhimurium mutants produced with the random mutagenic TnphoA transposon. A total of 3,000 transpositional mutants were isolated. Three strains among the 1,432 first mutants lost the ability to grow in the presence of biological and chemical detergents. They were prototrophic and exhibited normal lipopolysaccharide and outer membrane protein profiles after SDS-PAGE. They did not show sensitivity to dyes but showed very different sensitivities to antibiotics. For each mutant strain, Southern blotting analysis revealed a unique TnphoA insertion at different chromosomal locations. These observations were confirmed by transduction experiments.