GSE112169
HtrA-Mediated Selective Degradation of DNA Uptake Apparatus Accelerates Termination of Pneumococcal Transformation
As a sextual behavior, competence or natural transformation mediates lateral gene transfer, and thereby promotes exchange of antibiotic resistance and virulence traits among bacteria. Competence is assoicated with activation of many genes, rapid build-up of membrane-bound DNA uptake apparatus, and transient growth arrest. It is completely unknown how transformable bacteria recover from the competence-associated status. This work reveals that the membrane-associated HtrA protease enables the pneumococcus (an important human pathogen) to recover from the competence-associated status by breaking down the DNA uptake apparatus. This is achieved by selective degradation of ComEA and ComEC, the major components of the DNA uptake apparatus. Deleting htrA and/or over-expressing comEA-EC led to dramatic delay in competence termination. Based on high conservation of HtrA and DNA uptake proteins among transformable bacterial, the HtrA protease may serve as a general regulator of bacteria recovery from the competence-associated status. Overall design: Pairwise comparison of different competence-ON samples to competence-OFF sample of Streptococcus pneumoniae Rx1 (RNA-seq), analyzing the transcriptome dynamics during comeptence development. It was performed with deep sequencing, using an Illumina Hiseq_X-TEN machine with 150 nt paired-end reads.