iTRAQ-Based Quantitative Proteomic Analysis of Acinetobacter baumannii under Hypoxia and Normoxia Reveals the Role of OmpW as a Virulence Factor
María Luisa Gil-Marqués, Jerónimo Pachón, Younes Smani
Abstract
Acinetobacter baumannii causes infections that are very difficult to treat due to the high rate of resistance to most and sometimes all of the antimicrobials used in the clinical setting. There is an important need to develop new strategies to combat A. baumannii infections. One alternative could be blocking specific bacterial virulence factors that this pathogen needs to infect cells. Pathogens modulate their protein expression as a function of the environment, and several studies have reported that hypoxia occurs in a wide range of infections. Therefore, it would be interesting to determine the proteome of A. baumannii under hypoxia in order to find new virulence factors, such as the outer membrane protein OmpW, as potential targets for the design of novel therapies.