Pseudomonas aeruginosa two-component system CprRS regulates HigBA expression and bacterial cytotoxicity in response to LL-37 stress
Fig 1
CprRS is conserved in P. aeruginosa and contributes to its full virulence.
(A) Schematic representation of CprRS system genes and proteins. (B) Conservation analysis of cprRS genes in 872 P. aeruginosa strains. Dots represent outliers from the respective groups. (C) The top sequence Blast hits of CprS on other pathogen genomes by NCBI. The identities to CprS are also marked. (D) Growth curves of WT and mutants on LB medium. (E) Measurement virulence of the WT and mutant strains in a Galleria mellonella infection model. Each G. mellonella was injected with 10 μL of P. aeruginosa dilution (5 × 103 CFU/mL), and the PBS-injected larvae were the negative control. The larvae were monitored for 24 h after the infection (Mantel-Cox test for statistics, *P < 0.05). (F) Hierarchical clustering of the z-scored extracted ion chromatogram was used to evaluate the reproducibility of the proteome quantification in WT and ΔcprS strains. (G) Volcano plot displaying the proteomic profiles of WT and ΔcprS strains. The significantly up- and down-regulated proteins are labeled with red and cyan, respectively. The significant expressed proteins are also categorized by functional category in (H). Student’s t-test was used to assess the significance of differential expression of proteins (DEPs) between two groups. Proteins that have significance level of P < 0.05 and fold change >1.5 or < –1.5 were considered as DEPs.