Construction and characterization of three knockout mutants of the fbl gene in Staphylococcus lugdunensis

Staphylococcus lugdunensis is an important human pathogen that causes infectious diseases similar to those caused by Staphylococcus aureus. In contrast to S. aureus, only a very few pathogenicity factors of S. lugdunensis have been characterized. Notably, a genetic manipulation of S. lugdunensis has not yet been described. Ours is the first report where transformation of three different plasmids ( pBT2, pRB473, and pT181) into S. lugdunensis and a directed genetic manipulation of S. lugdunensis are described. We constructed fbl knockout mutants from three different strains of S. lugdunensis to show that at least in these strains, the fibrinogen binding is exclusively mediated by Fbl.