Histamine activates HinK to promote the virulence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa

During infections,bacteria stimulate host cells to produce and release histamine,which is a key mediator of vital cellular processes in animals.However,the mechanisms underlying the bacterial cell’s ability to sense and respond to histamine are poorly understood.Herein,we show that HinK,a Lys R-type transcriptional regulator,is required to evoke responses to histamine in Pseudomonas aeruginosa,an important human pathogen.HinK directly binds to and activates the promoter of genes involved in histamine uptake and metabolism,iron acquisition,and Pseudomonas quinolone signal(PQS)biosynthesis.The transcriptional regulatory activity of HinK is induced when histamine is present,and it occurs when HinK binds with imidazole-4-acetic acid(Im AA),a histamine metabolite whose production in P.aeruginosa depends on the HinK-activated histamine uptake and utilization operon hin DAC-pa0222.Importantly,the inactivation of HinK inhibits diverse pathogenic phenotypes of P.aeruginosa.These results suggest that histamine acts as an interkingdom signal and provide insights into the mechanism used by pathogenic bacteria to exploit host regulatory signals to promote virulence.

A novel copper-sensing two-component system for inducing Dsb gene expression in bacteria

In nature, bacteria must sense copper and tightly regulate gene expression to evade copper toxicity. Here,we identify a new copper-responsive two-component system named DsbRS in the important human pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa;in this system, DsbS is a sensor histidine kinase, and DsbR, its cognate response regulator, directly induces the transcription of genes involved in protein disulfide bond formation(Dsb)(i.e., the dsbDEG operon and dsbB). In the absence of copper, DsbS acts as a phosphatase toward DsbR, thus blocking the transcription of Dsb genes. In the presence of copper, the metal ion directly binds to the sensor domain of DsbS, and the Cys82 residue plays a critical role in this process. The copperbinding behavior appears to inhibit the phosphatase activity of DsbS, leading to the activation of DsbR.The copper resistance of the dsbRS knock-out mutant is restored by the ectopic expression of the dsbDEG operon, which is a DsbRS major target. Strikingly, cognates of the dsbRS-dsbDEG pair are widely distributed across eubacteria. In addition, a DsbR-binding site, which contains the consensus sequence 5’-TTA-N8-TTAA-3’, is detected in the promoter region of dsbDEG homologs in these species. These findings suggest that the regulation of Dsb genes by DsbRS represents a novel mechanism by which bacterial cells cope with copper stress.