Bacterial membrane vesicles transport their DNA cargo into host cells

Abstract

Bacterial outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) are extracellular sacs containing biologically active products, such as proteins, cell wall components and toxins. OMVs are reported to contain DNA, however, little is known about the nature of this DNA, nor whether it can be transported into host cells. Our work demonstrates that chromosomal DNA is packaged into OMVs shed by bacteria during exponential phase. Most of this DNA was present on the external surfaces of OMVs, with smaller amounts located internally. The DNA within the internal compartments of Pseudomonas aeruginosa OMVs were consistently enriched in specific regions of the bacterial chromosome, encoding proteins involved in virulence, stress response, antibiotic resistance and metabolism. Furthermore, we demonstrated that OMVs carry DNA into eukaryotic cells, and this DNA was detectable by PCR in the nuclear fraction of cells. These findings suggest a role for OMV-associated DNA in bacterial-host cell interactions and have implications for OMV-based vaccines.

Insights into the antibiotic resistance dissemination in a wastewater effluent microbiome: bacteria, viruses and vesicles matter

“…S11). Since vesicles commonly package fragments of genomic DNA including ARGs (Bitto et al ., ), our data suggest the hypothesis of these above mentioned non‐viral contigs containing ARGs and PRGs being packaged in the putative detected vesicles.…”

Milk MicroRNAs in Health and Disease

“…These can originate from all the cells present in the mammary gland (Lasser et al., ), including epithelial and immune cells. Milk EVs could also be secreted by the bacteria colonizing the mammary gland or found in milk (Andreas et al., ; Le Doare et al., ; Tartaglia et al., ), which can also secrete small RNA sequences (Choi, Kim, Hong, & Lee, ; Choi, Kwon, Hong, & Lee, ) in outer membrane vesicles (Kulp & Kuehn, ) and transfer their nucleic acid content to human cells (Bitto et al., ). Therefore, it is most likely that milk is a complex carrier of a multitude of small EVs with different proteins, RNA, mRNA, and microRNA cargo originating from a multitude of cell types.…”

Stromules: Probing Formation and Function

“…These extracellular vesicles often contain DNA and regulatory RNA and proteins that can influence the function of recipient cells (Yáñez-Mó et al, 2015;Bitto et al, 2017;Pérez-Bermúdez et al, 2017). The abundant cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus as well as other photosynthetic bacteria have been observed to release vesicles into the ocean (Biller et al, 2014(Biller et al, , 2017.…”