New Role of the Disulfide Stress Effector YjbH in β-Lactam Susceptibility of Staphylococcus aureus

Staphylococcus aureus is exposed to multiple antimicrobial compounds, including oxidative burst products and antibiotics. The various mechanisms and regulatory pathways governing susceptibility or resistance are complex and only superficially understood. Bacillus subtilis recently has been shown to control disulfide stress responses by the thioredoxin-related YjbH protein, which binds to the transcriptional regulator Spx and controls its degradation via the proteasome-like ClpXP protease. We show that the S. aureus YjbH homolog has a role in susceptibility to the disulfide stress-inducing agent diamide that is similar to that in B. subtilis, and we demonstrate that the four cysteine residues in YjbH are required for this activity. In addition, the inactivation of YjbH led to moderate resistance to oxacillin and other beta-lactam antibiotics, and this phenotypic change was associated with higher penicillin-binding protein 4 levels and increased peptidoglycan cross-linking. Of note, the impact of YjbH on beta-lactam susceptibility still was observed when the four cysteines of YjbH were mutated, indicating that the roles of YjbH in disulfide stress and beta-lactam resistance rely on different types of interactions. These data suggest that the ClpXP adaptor YjbH has more target proteins than previously thought, and that oxidative burst and beta-lactam resistance mechanisms of S. aureus are closely linked.