Identification of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus carrying an exfoliative toxin A gene encoding phage isolated from a hospitalized patient in Turkey

Abstract

From the four known isoforms of the staphylococcal exfoliative toxins (ETs), only ETA and ETB are the major causative agents. General knowledge is that the gene for ETA is located on the chromosome, whereas that for ETB is located on a large plasmid. Yoshizawa and co-workers (2000, Microbiol. Immunol. 44(3): 189-191) isolated, for the first time, a temperate phage (φETA) that carried the structural gene for ETA from an ETA-producing strain of Staphylococcus aureus. In this study, we presented eta gene encoding temperate phages isolated from methicillin-resistant S.aureus (MRSA) isolates obtained from patients in a Turkish hospital. Molecular analysis of the phage genome revealed that the eta gene is located upstream to amidase and holin genes, the same as in the φETA genome. However, partial sequence analysis of amidase and holin genes revealed polymorphic variation. In addition to polymorphic variation, restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis of all of the phage genomes showed that the ETA-containing phage is different from the rest of the phage genomes. The phylogenetic dendrogram of pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) analysis showed that the ETA-carrying MRSA is quite different from the rest of the MRSA strains. This is the first report showing that a MRSA strain carries an ETA-encoding phage.

Identification of virulence genes carried by bacteriophages obtained from clinically isolated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

“…Yamaguchi et al [32] also isolated a phage (φ ETA) that encodes an ETA from S. aureus, isolated from a human impetigo patient, and determined the complete nucleotide sequence of the φ ETA genome. Recently, we isolated an eta gene carrying phage obtained from MRSA strain isolated from the blood of the patient without any skin lesion [33]. Both in the previous study and this study, we showed that the MRSA φ ETA genome was different from the genomes of the other phages.…”

Comparative Transcriptome Analysis Reveals Differentially Expressed Genes Related to Antimicrobial Properties of Lysostaphin in Staphylococcus aureus

“…In this study, we observed significant transcriptional changes in S. aureus Newman_2010 upon exposure to the triple-acting fusion protein PGH1801 [ 2 , 12 ]. We found most of these are membrane proteins, cell wall related proteins [ 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 ], such as amidase [ 12 ], peptidase [ 29 ], holin [ 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 ], and phospholipase D/transphosphatidylase [ 43 , 44 ].…”