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Applied and Environmental Microbiology, May 2004, p. 2717-2721, Vol. 70, No. 5
0099-2240/04/$08.00+0 DOI: 10.1128/AEM.70.5.2717-2721.2004
Copyright © 2004, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
Increased ATPase Activity Is Responsible for Acid Sensitivity of Nisin-Resistant Listeria monocytogenes ATCC 700302
Jennifer Cleveland McEntire,
George M. Carman, and Thomas J. Montville*
Department of Food Science, New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901
Received 8 September 2003/
Accepted 1 February 2004

ABSTRACT
The growth of the foodborne pathogen
Listeria monocytogenes can be controlled by nisin, an antimicrobial peptide. A spontaneous
mutant of
L. monocytogenes shows both resistance to nisin and
increased acid sensitivity compared to the wild type. Changes
in the cell membrane correlated with nisin resistance, but the
mechanism for acid sensitivity appears unrelated. When hydrochloric
or lactic acid is added to cultures, intracellular ATP levels
drop significantly in the mutant (
P < 0.01) compared to the
results seen with the wild type. Characterization of the F
0F
1 ATPase, which hydrolyzes ATP to pump protons from the cell cytoplasm,
shows that the enzyme is more active in the mutant than in the
wild type. These data support a model in which the increased
activity of the mutant ATPase upon acid addition depletes the
cells' supply of ATP, resulting in cell death.

INTRODUCTION
The natural preservative nisin can be effectively used to control
the growth of
Listeria monocytogenes, a foodborne pathogen.
The psychrotrophic pathogen is capable of multiplying at refrigeration
temperatures, altering its membrane fluidity by decreasing the
length and degree of saturation of the membrane fatty acids
(
8). The presence of
L. monocytogenes in hot dogs, smoked salmon,
cheese, and ready-to-eat chicken and turkey, for example, has
resulted in recalls of these products owing to the zero-tolerance
standards for the organism in ready-to-eat foods (U.S. Food
and Drug Administration, 2001 [
www.fda.gov/oc/po/firmrecalls/archive.html];
U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety Inspection Service,
2001 [
www.fsis.usda.gov/OA/recalls/recdb/rec2000.htm]).
The mode of action of nisin has been extensively researched. As a Class Ia bacteriocin, its bactericidal action results from the formation of transient pores in the target cell membranes (1, 21). Lipid II, a potential docking molecule for nisin, appears to enhance the activity of the 34-amino-acid peptide (4).
Nisin resistance is well documented, but the exact mechanism of nisin resistance remains to be elucidated. The frequency of nisin resistance ranges from 102 to 107 but can be decreased by exposing cells to an acidic environment low in salt at 10°C (10). Several authors have correlated nisin resistance with a change in membrane composition. Others have noted the up or down regulation of proteins with functions that do not have a clear relationship to nisin resistance (11). Davies et al. (7) concluded that mutations causing nisin resistance were the result of "mechanism(s) other than an alteration of membrane composition," citing cell wall modifications as a probable cause. However, Crandall and Montville (6) observed changes in the composition of the nisin-resistant cell membrane when cells were grown in the presence of nisin. Lipid analysis of membranes from nisin-resistant cells shows that there is an increase in the proportion of straight-chain and saturated fatty acids and that the ratio of C15:C17 is decreased, resulting in a more rigid membrane (14).
Our laboratory has found that a spontaneous nisin-resistant L. monocytogenes strain had increased sensitivity to acid (15). After finding that the changes in the membrane of the nisin-resistant strain did not alter the permeability to acid, we hypothesized that differences in acid sensitivity were due to differences in the energy status of the cells. Here we show that although there is no difference in acidification of the cytoplasm, the ATPase activity of the mutant is greater than that of the wild type under acidic conditions. Upon exposure to acid (either organic or inorganic), intracellular ATP levels rapidly drop. This suggests that when the nisin-resistant strain is treated with acid, the ATPase depletes cellular ATP levels and the cells are unable to survive.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Bacterial strains and growth conditions.
L. monocytogenes Scott A (wild type) and NR 30 (ATCC 700302),
the spontaneous nisin-resistant mutant of Scott A, were grown
overnight at 30°C with agitation in brain heart infusion
broth (BHI) (pH 6.5) buffered with 100 mM potassium phosphate.
L. monocytogenes NR 30 was always grown with 200 IU of nisin
(Novasin [a gift from Rhodia, Madison, Wis.] or pure nisin [a
gift from Chr. Hansen, Horsholm, Denmark]) ml
1.
ATP assay.
The determination of total and extracellular levels of ATP was accomplished using an ATP bioluminescence assay kit from Sigma and following the procedure of McEntire et al. (15). Briefly, cells were washed in 50 mM 2-(N-morpholino)ethanesulfonic acid (MES; pH 6.5) and resuspended to A600 = 0.6. The washed cells were resuspended in MES and energized with 0.2% glucose for 20 min at 30°C. In one experiment, equimolar concentrations of hydrochloric (HCl) or lactic acid (40 mM) were added to 0.6 ml of energized cells. The final pH of the cell mixture was 4.3 ± 0.1. In another experiment, lactic acid was used to adjust the pH to 4.9. Total and extracellular ATP levels were measured before acid addition (time, 1 min) and at intervals up to 20 min after treatment. Total ATP levels were determined by adding 20 µl of treated cells to 80 µl of dimethyl sulfoxide, adding 5 ml of sterile water, and using 100 µl of the mixture in the assay with 100 µl of enzyme mixture. For determination of extracellular ATP levels, 100 µl of treated cells was added to a test tube. A total of 5 ml of sterile water was added, and a 100-µl sample was added to 100 µl of enzyme mixture. Intracellular ATP levels were calculated as the difference between the total and extracellular ATP levels at each time point. To standardize between experiments, cell dry weight was determined by drying 1 ml of cell suspension in saline solution in a preweighed aluminum dish overnight at 45°C. Each experiment was repeated at least three times, and the Student t test was used to determine significant differences after 20 min.
In vivo acid sensitivity.
Exponential phase cells (A600 = 0.28) were centrifuged, concentrated 10-fold, and then diluted 100-fold in BHI at pH 6.5, BHI at pH 3.0, BHI at pH 3.0 plus 1 mM 1,3-dicyclohexylcarbodiimide (DCCD) (Sigma) (dissolved in ethanol as a 100x solution), or BHI at pH 3.0 plus 1% ethanol (as a solvent control for DCCD). Cells were incubated at room temperature for 1 h before enumeration by serial dilution in 0.1% peptone water and plating on BHI agar. Colonies were counted after 48 h at 30°C.
Isolation of membrane vesicles.
Cell membranes were collected on the basis of the method of Hicks and Krulwich (12); the method was modified for L. monocytogenes. Early-stationary-phase (A600 = 1.2) cells were centrifuged at 9,500 x g for 10 min at 4°C and resuspended in osmotic buffer (0.25 M sucrose, 50 mM Tris HCl [pH 6.5], 200 mM KCl, 10 mM MgCl2, 5 mM 3-aminobenzamide, 1 mM phenylmethylsulfonyl fluoride, DNase and RNase [0.3 mg each/liter of growth medium]). Cell pellets were frozen at 70°C until use. Cells (in a total volume of 40 ml) were broken in a precooled French pressure cell at 18,000 lb/in2 and subsequently incubated at 30°C for 10 min. Broken cells were centrifuged twice at 9,500 x g for 10 min at 4°C to remove unbroken cells and debris. The membranes were pelleted by ultracentrifugation in a type Ti60 rotor at 100,000 x g for 90 min at 4°C. The pellet was washed with French press buffer minus sucrose and centrifuged for 60 min. A buffer consisting of 20 mM Tris HCl (pH 6.5), 40 mM KCl, 10 mM MgCl2, 5 mM 3-aminobenzamide, and 0.2 mM phenylmethylsulfonyl fluoride was used for the final 60-min wash. Membranes were resuspended in 1 ml of this buffer and stored in 100-µl aliquots at 70°C.
Characterization of ATPase activity.
A method described by Hicks (12) and based on the method of Lebel et al. (13) was modified to determine the ATPase activity of L. monocytogenes. The reaction mixture consisted of 50 mM Tris HCl (adjusted to the desired pH), MgCl2 (up to 30 mM), and Na2ATP (pH 7.0) (up to 10 mM). For pH optimum experiments, 20 mM MgCl2 and 10 mM ATP were used. To determine the magnesium requirement of the enzyme at pH 5.0, 5 mM ATP was used. Kinetic studies were performed at pH 5.0 with 20 mM MgCl2. To ensure that activity was attributable to the F0F1 ATPase, up to 1 mM of the specific inhibitor DCCD was added. To initiate the reaction, 10 µl of thawed membranes was added to the reaction mixture and the tube was vortexed and incubated at 30°C for 30 min. The reaction was stopped by the addition of 50 µl of 50% trichloroacetic acid, and the precipitate was removed by centrifugation. The supernatant was added to an equal volume of the detection solution. The detection solution was a 1.6:2:2 ratio of LeBels reagent (3.6 M acetic acid, 0.66 M sodium acetate, 20 mM copper sulfate), ammonium molybdate (5% stock solution), and a 5% sodium sulfite-2% p-methylaminophenyl sulfate solution. Color development proceeded for exactly 5 min at room temperature before absorbance at 750 nm was recorded. A standard curve was obtained by adding potassium phosphate to the reaction mixture. For the blank and standards, membranes were not added until after trichloroacetic acid addition. Activity is expressed as micromoles of phosphate minute1 mg of protein1. The means and standard deviations of triplicate experiments are presented. EZ Fit software (Perrella Scientific) was used for the analysis of kinetic data.
Protein concentration was determined by the method of Bradford (3) and using Bio-Rad's protein assay dye reagent concentrate according to the manufacturer's directions. Bovine serum albumin (stock, 1 mg/ml) was used as the standard. Color development after exactly 5 min was measured at 570 nm in a Dynex 96-well plate reader.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Effect of acid on ATP levels.
Previous work showed that as pH decreases,
L. monocytogenes NR 30, the nisin-resistant mutant, grows more slowly than the
wild type until no growth of the mutant is observed when the
pH is adjusted below 4.9 with lactic acid (
14). Since
L. monocytogenes NR 30 is more sensitive to acid than the Scott A strain, the
ATP assay was used to study the effect of HCl and lactic acid
on cellular ATP levels. The addition of HCl to Scott A cells
had very little effect on ATP levels (Fig.
1). The decrease
in intracellular ATP levels of Scott A in the presence of lactic
acid was not statistically significant at any time point. At
20 min after acid exposure,
L. monocytogenes NR 30 experienced
a significant (
P < 0.05), decrease in intracellular ATP levels
upon addition of either acid (Fig.
1). The effect was more pronounced
for lactic acid than for HCl. Even though the level of the control
for strain NR 30 appears higher, there is no significant difference
between the final intracellular ATP levels of the strains in
comparison to each other when they were treated with lactic
acid at pH 4.3. Neither strain is capable of growth at this
pH. The Scott A strain, but not the NR 30 strain, can replicate
at pH 4.9 (
15). After 20 min at pH 4.9, the intracellular ATP
level of the NR 30 strain was significantly lower than that
of the Scott A strain (
P < 0.01) (Fig.
2). While the levels
of extracellular ATP increased as the duration of acid treatment
increased, these did not wholly account for the changes in intracellular
ATP, indicating that ATP was also being hydrolyzed. These data
show that at acid levels at which the wild-type but not the
mutant strain can grow, there is greater ATP depletion in the
mutant than in the wild type. This suggests that the depletion
of energy is the cause of growth inhibition in the mutant strain.
In vivo acid sensitivity and contribution of the ATPase.
To show the acid sensitivity of strain NR 30 and to assess the
contribution of the F
0F
1 ATPase in the response of the cells
to acid, cells were exposed to pH 3.0 with or without the specific
inhibitor DCCD. The inhibitor blocks the proton channel of F
0 by covalently binding to amino acid that is the H
+ binding site
in the c subunit (known to be Glu-54 in
Propionigenium modestum and Asp-61 in
Escherichia coli) (
5,
9). The inability of the
cell to pump protons leads to increased cell death for both
the wild-type and mutant strains (data not shown). Acid alone
causes a reduction in the population of the wild-type Scott
A strain of less than 1 log, while the nisin-resistant mutant
NR 30 strain experiences a 2.7-log decrease in counts. DCCD
treatment results in an additional reduction in population for
the strains of 2 to 2.5 log, showing that the F
0F
1 ATPase is
necessary for cell survival.
ATPase activity of wild-type and mutant cells.
Lactic acid bacteria use substrate-level phosphorylation to generate ATP. Since the cells lack an electron transport chain and do not generate ATP through oxidative phosphorylation, the primary function of the F0F1 ATPase is to control intracellular pH by pumping protons (5). Because of its role in maintaining a near-neutral cytoplasmic pH in an acidic environment, the enzyme has been studied in bacteria important in oral care (2, 18, 19). There are no data on the kinetics of ATPase activity in L. monocytogenes. It has a high degree of sequence homology to other organisms (5). Cotter et al. used degenerate primers to locate the alpha, beta, and gamma subunits of L. monocytogenes strains with more than 70% similarity with Bacillus species (5).
O'Sullivan and Condon showed a relationship between ATPase activity and intracellular ATP levels of Lactococcus lactis subsp. cremoris NCDO 712. When cells were grown in a chemostat, the cytoplasmic pH could be lowered to increase ATPase activity with the concurrent loss of intracellular ATP (16). Since total ATP levels in strain NR 30 dropped upon addition of acid, the activity of the membrane-bound ATPase was measured. The maximum detection of phosphate in both strains was obtained at pH 5.0 and decreased as the pH was raised until virtually no activity was detected at pH 8.0 (Fig. 3). Little activity was measured at pH 3.0. At pH 5.0, the ATPase activity of the nisin-resistant mutant was more than threefold higher than that of the wild-type strain.
Many fermentative organisms show optimal ATPase activity at
more-neutral pH compared to
L. monocytogenes (
18,
19). For
L. lactis subsp.
cremoris NCDO 712, the highest ATPase activity
was observed at pH 5.5, the lowest pH tested (
16). The relationship
between activity and pH determined for
L. monocytogenes Scott
A seems to be most similar to data reported for
L. casei ATCC
4644, an aciduric organism (
2). Studies of the ATPase in other
organisms show that the enzyme requires magnesium as a cofactor.
The magnesium concentration required for optimal activity was
20 mM MgCl
2 when the ATP concentration was held constant at
5 mM (data not shown). This concentration was used for kinetic
studies.
To ensure that the release of phosphate was the result of the activity of the F0F1 ATPase and not of that of other components of the membrane preparations, the effect of increasing concentrations of DCCD was determined. The decrease in activity observed when up to 1 mM DCCD was added confirmed that the F0F1 ATPase is responsible for activity (Fig. 4). DCCD did not inhibit 100% of activity even at the highest concentration tested, but this was not unexpected, as reports indicate that only 30 to 73% of F0F1 ATPase activity can be inhibited, depending on the organism and conditions (18). The maximum inhibition of the Scott A strain was 33%, and strain NR 30 activity was inhibited up to 39%, in similarity to results obtained by Sturr and Marquis for octylglucoside-extracted F0F1 complexes of L. casei 4646 (18).
Figure
5 shows that the apparent
Km values of ATP for the two
strains were similar: 4.39 and 3.37 mM ATP for the wild-type
and mutant strains, respectively. The apparent
Vmax value of
the enzyme in the mutant NR 30 strain is almost double that
of the wild-type strain (1.25 versus 0.69 µmol of phosphate
min
1 mg of protein
1). There is a 2.4-fold increase
in the specificity constant (
Vmax/
Km) of the mutant compared
to the wild type. The increased catalytic efficiency and specificity
constant of the mutant shows that the mutant has a more active
F
0F
1 ATPase than the wild type. Very little work has been done
to quantify and characterize the subunits of the ATPase in
L. monocytogenes (
5). In other organisms, particularly
E. coli,
the number of c subunits per ATPase has been shown to be variable,
being greater when cells were grown on a fermentable carbon
source where proton pumping would be required (
17). The number
of c subunits per
E. coli ATPase is between 8 and 14. Between
three and four protons are pumped per ATP synthesized, and the
H
+/ATP ratio can be manipulated by point mutations in the c
subunit, but the exact numbers are unknown for enzymes working
in the opposite direction (
9,
17,
20). Work done using
E. coli for examination of the biosynthetic capacity of the ATPase showed
that ATP was synthesized more slowly in cells in which the enzyme
had more c subunits compared to those having fewer subunits
(
17). A potential explanation of the increased ATPase activity
of the mutant could be that the number of c subunits is decreased
compared to the wild-type number. This could account for the
increase in
Vmax and the depletion of ATP, since more ATP would
be needed to pump the equivalent number of protons compared
to the amount needed with the wild type. This model would be
strengthened if the number of c subunits for each strain could
be determined experimentally.
Upon exposure to acid (either organic or inorganic), intracellular
ATP levels of the nisin-resistant mutant NR 30 strain rapidly
drop. This is a result of the increased ATPase activity of the
mutant. Kinetic analysis shows that while the affinity constants
are similar, the catalytic efficiency of the mutant is higher.
At pH 5.0, at which level maximum enzymatic activity is observed,
L. monocytogenes NR 30 is more sensitive to acid than the wild
type. While the ATPase hydrolyzes ATP to pump protons from the
cytoplasm, the stoichiometry is variable (
17). It is quite possible
that Scott A has more c subunits in the ATPase and is therefore
able to use ATP more efficiently to achieve the same internal
pH. NR 30 may need to use more ATP to pump an equal number of
protons; such an increase in the use of ATP results in the depletion
of ATP and cell death. Further work is needed to support this
hypothesis.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank Arthur Guffanti and David Hicks of Mount Sinai Medical
School for providing details of the ATPase assay. Chr. Hansen
and Rhodia are thanked for supplying nisin, and Purac is thanked
for providing lactic acid.
J. C. McEntire is supported by a U.S. Department of Agriculture National Needs Fellowship in Food Safety.

FOOTNOTES
* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Department of Food Science, New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 65 Dudley Rd., New Brunswick, NJ 08901. Phone: (732) 932-9611, ext. 222. Fax: (732) 932-6776. E-mail:
montville{at}aesop.rutgers.edu.

Present address: Institute of Food Technologists, Washington, DC 20036. 

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Applied and Environmental Microbiology, May 2004, p. 2717-2721, Vol. 70, No. 5
0099-2240/04/$08.00+0 DOI: 10.1128/AEM.70.5.2717-2721.2004
Copyright © 2004, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
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