Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 107, Issue 26, Pages 11954-11958Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1000489107
Keywords
antibiotic resistance; transformation; targetron
Categories
Funding
- Infectigen
- Bonninchi Foundation
- Ernst et Lucie Schmidheiny Foundation
- Swiss National Science Foundation [31003A-118309, 3100A0-116075, 3100A0-112370/1]
- Canton de Geneve
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Staphylococcus aureus is an versatile pathogen that can cause life-threatening infections. Depending on the clinical setting, up to 50% of S. aureus infections are caused by methicillin-resistant strains (MRSA) that in most cases are resistant to many other antibiotics, making treatment difficult. The emergence of community-acquired MRSA drastically changed the picture by increasing the risk of MRSA infections. Horizontal transfer of genes encoding for antibiotic resistance or virulence factors is a major concern of multidrug-resistant S. aureus infections and epidemiology. We identified and characterized a type III-like restriction system present in clinical S. aureus strains that prevents transformation with DNA from other bacterial species. Interestingly, our analysis revealed that some clinical MRSA strains are deficient in this restriction system, and thus are hypersusceptible to the horizontal transfer of DNA from other species, such as Escherichia coli, and could easily acquire a vancomycin-resistance gene from enterococci. Inactivation of this restriction system dramatically increases the transformation efficiency of clinical S. aureus strains, opening the field of molecular genetic manipulation of these strains using DNA of exogenous origin.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available