Controlling the hypermutation: Exploitation of the MutS protein in Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Abstract

Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections commonly develop in individuals with cystic fibrosis (CF), and its adaptation in such an unfavourable condition is always found to be related to hypermutation. In fact, most of the hypermutation is due to the defects in mutS gene which involves in the mismatch repair mechanism, causing the acceleration of mutation rate and adaptive evolution. In order to rheostatically express the MutS protein and achieve “hypomutation” (in which the rate of mutation is lower than that of wild type strain), an exogenous mutS gene with rhamnose-inducible promoter was cloned into MPAO1 mutS::Tn mutant strain. Present findings demonstrate that this system is tightly-controlled and stable, with less rifampicin-resistant mutant frequency and more fluorescence intensity from a GFP-tagged MutS expressing cells were observed when the concentration of the inducer increases. Interestingly, the results from Western blot analysis show that less MutS protein is required to suppress hypermutation in the wild type strain, as compared to our construct that behaves similar to the wild type but obviously needs more MutS expression to achieve such state. This indicates that the exogenous MutS might be lacking of other important protein to work efficiently in mismatch recognition. Therefore, based on our cDNA analysis, we found that fdxA gene next to the mutS gene is in the same operon, which could suggest that they might be functionally related in the DNA repair machinery.