EsxA might as a virulence factor induce antibodies in patients with Staphylococcus aureus infection

Abstract

Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) is an important human pathogen, which commonly causes the acquired infectious diseases in the hospital and community. Effective and simple antibiotic treatment against S. aureus-related disease becomes increasingly difficult. Developing a safe and effective vaccine against S. aureus has become one of the world’s hot spots once again. The key issue of developing the vaccine of S. aureus is how to find an ideal key pathogenic gene of S. aureus. It was previously suggested that EsxA might be a very important factor in S. aureus abscess formation in mice, but clinical experimental evidence was lacking. We therefore expressed EsxA protein through prokaryotic expression system and purified EsxA protein by Ni-affinity chromatography. ELISA was used to detect the anti-EsxA antibodies in sera of 78 patients with S. aureus infection and results showed that the anti-EsxA antibodies were positive in the sera of 19 patients. We further analyzed the EsxA positive antibodies related strains by antimicrobial susceptibility assay and found that all of the corresponding strains were multi-drug resistant. Among those multi-drug resistant strains, 73.7% were resistant to MRSA. The results indicated EsxA is very important in the pathogenesis of S. aureus. We suggested that the EsxA is very valuable as vaccine candidate target antigens for prevention and control of S. aureus infection.

Delineation of the pan-proteome of fish-pathogenic Streptococcus agalactiae strains using a label-free shotgun approach

“…Abortive infection protein, an integrative and conjugative element involved in virulence and metal resistance in GBS [79], was identified in SA20 . Virulence factor EsxA, which was identified in SA53, was shown to contribute to bacterial dissemination and colonization of Streptococcus suis in a mouse infection model [80] and to induce antibodies in humans infected with Staphylococcus aureus [81]. Another virulence protein identified in SA53 was gluconate 5-dehydrogenase, which catalyzes the reversible oxireduction of D-gluconate to 5-keto-D-gluconate [82].…”

Cloning and Expression of the EsxA Gene and Analysis of the Growth-Promoting Effects of the Encoded Protein on Rice Seedlings

“…Thus, its potential role in the mechanism underlying the plant growthpromoting activities of Paenibacillus strains remained unknown. Earlier investigations on EsxA focused on its effects on the pathogenicity of animal pathogens or its induction of immune responses in disease-resistant animals (Ma et al 2015;Zhou et al 2013). The results of the current study imply that the mechanism regulating the plant growth-promoting effects of Paenibacillus strains, including NK3-4, may involve the secretion of EsxA.…”

“…In addition to being important for the pathogenicity of animal pathogens, it can also induce an immune response in animals (Yi et al 2018). For example, Staphylococcus aureus EsxA can promote antibody production in patients infected with this bacterium (Zhou et al 2013).…”

Towards S. aureus maldi-typing. (c2014)

“…Pathogenesis of this protein is related to its ability to induce antibodies in S. aureus infected patients. Moreover, Virulence factor EsxA makes a good target antigen for new S. aureus control and prevention vaccines (H. Zhou et al, 2013).…”