A Shift in Central Metabolism Accompanies Virulence Activation in Pseudomonas aeruginosa
Kumar Perinbam, Jenu V. Chacko, Anerudh Kannan, Michelle A. Digman, Albert Siryaporn
Abstract
The rise of antibiotic resistance requires the development of new strategies to combat bacterial infection and pathogenesis. A major direction has been the development of drugs that broadly target virulence. However, few targets have been identified due to the species-specific nature of many virulence regulators. The lack of a virulence regulator that is conserved across species has presented a further challenge to the development of therapeutics. Here, we identify that NADH activity has an important role in the induction of virulence in the pathogen P. aeruginosa . This finding, coupled with the ubiquity of NADH in bacterial pathogens, opens up the possibility of targeting enzymes that process NADH as a potential broad antivirulence approach.