Pseudomonas aeruginosa PA14 Raw sequence reads
Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a common pathogen in the lung, shows resistance to a broad range of antibiotics which highlights the need for novel therapeutic options. Neutrophils play a critical role in the eradication of P. aeruginosa in the lung which is revealed by the observation that defects in pathogen neutrophil killing is associated with P. aeruginosa pneumonia or colonization. In the current work, we investigated the mechanism by which P. aeruginosa evades neutrophil killing in the lung. An unbiased genome-wide screen of P. aeruginosa gene mutants was performed using a library of transposon-insertion mutants in the P. aeruginosa strain PA14. We intratracheally infected C57BL6/J mice with the mutant library with and without neutrophil depletion using anti-Ly6G antibody. To identify pathogen genes required for establishing lung infection in the absence and presence of neutrophils, we determined the relative abundance of individual mutants both in the input and the lungs of mice 24 hours after infection.