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Applied and Environmental Microbiology, May 2006, p. 3154-3160, Vol. 72, No. 5
0099-2240/06/$08.00+0 doi:10.1128/AEM.72.5.3154-3160.2006
Copyright © 2006, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
Jesús Aranda,2,
Gerard Àlvarez,2
Jordi Barbé,1,2 and
Montserrat Llagostera1,2*
Centre de Recerca en Sanitat Animal (CReSA),1 Departament de Genètica i Microbiologia, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, 08193 Barcelona, Spain2
Received 9 November 2005/ Accepted 20 February 2006
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Temperate bacteriophages are excellent tools for genetic manipulation of bacteria. They may be useful for carrying out generalized transduction and for development of cloning vectors (9, 13, 16, 35). Several P. multocida bacteriophages were described in the past, but they were used only for typing proposals (19). To our knowledge, no transducing bacteriophages have been described for P. multocida so far. Moreover, no P. multocida phage has been completely sequenced.
In this context, we have characterized a temperate bacteriophage (F108) obtained from a P. multocida serogroup A isolate that is able to carry out generalized transduction. This bacteriophage has also been sequenced, and the absence of pathogenic factors in its genome has been demonstrated by both in silico and in vivo experimental methods. These data suggest that bacteriophage F108 may be a suitable genetic tool for P. multocida serogroup A strains.
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cells were grown in Luria-Bertani medium (17), and when necessary, ampicillin was added at 50 µg/ml. P. multocida was grown in brain heart infusion (BHI) liquid medium or on BHI or sheep blood agar plates (SBAP). The cultures were always incubated at 37°C. Isolation of spontaneous mutants and transduction experiments were performed by plating overnight cultures on BHI plates using rifampin (100 µg/ml), streptomycin (75 µg/ml), or nalidixic acid (30 µg/ml). DNA extractions, cloning, transformation, and other molecular techniques used in this work were performed as described elsewhere (23).
Isolation and induction of bacteriophage F108.
Several natural isolates of P. multocida from the collection of the Institut de Recerca i Tecnologia Agroalimentàries (IRTA, Spain) were tested. For each P. multocida strain, overnight (ON) liquid cultures were grown and centrifuged, and their supernatant was passed through a 45-µm filter. Each filtered supernatant (lysate) was tested on each P. multocida strain to detect the presence of bacteriophage plaques. Briefly, each P. multocida strain was grown ON on SBAP. Using this fresh plate, a cell suspension (optical density at 600 nm, 0.8) was made in 2 ml of BHI. One hundred microliters of this suspension was added to 3 ml of soft-BHI agar (BHI liquid medium and 0.7% agar; prewarmed at 45°C) and layered on BHI plates. Ten microliters of each lysate was then placed on the plate. After ON incubation at 37°C, growth inhibition was observed only for P. multocida strain PM403 (Table 1) when the PM108 lysate was used. For PFU/ml counts, 100 µl of lysate serial dilutions was added to the warm soft-BHI agar; in this case, and after ON incubation, bacteriophage plaques were observed. Mitomycin C-mediated phage induction was carried out as described elsewhere (19). Briefly, a P. multocida ON culture was diluted 1/100 in fresh BHI medium, and after 2 h of incubation at 37°C, mitomycin C (0.5 µg/ml) was added. Thirty minutes later, the treated culture was centrifuged, and the pellet was resuspended in fresh BHI medium without mitomycin C and incubated 2 h at 37°C. Finally, the culture was centrifuged, the supernatant was filtered, and the lysate was tested for the presence of bacteriophages as described above. Electron microscopic analysis of bacteriophage F108 particles was carried out as previously reported (14).
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TABLE 1. P. multocida strains used in this study
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F108 sequencing.
Two strategies were used to sequence F108. First of all, a shotgun subclone library was prepared from purified phage DNA using plasmid pBluescript SK(+). Library plasmids were sequenced using the fmol DNA cycle sequencing system (Roche) by the dideoxy method (24) on an ALF sequencer (Amersham Pharmacia). Sequences obtained from the library clones allowed for the design of oligonucleotides that were used for direct sequencing with the Thermo Sequenase Cy5 dye terminator sequencing kit (Amersham Biosciences) by the dideoxy method, which allows for the closing of gaps between contigs. This direct sequencing showed that the bacteriophage F108 genome is linear with a 7-nucleotide 5' overhang (data not shown). The full-phage genome was sequenced to sixfold coverage and was assembled using SeqManII (DNAstar). Codon usage was determined by using the www.kazusa.or.jp/codon/countcodon.html facility (18). Open reading frames (ORFs) were identified using Glimmer 2.02 (http://nbc11.biologie.uni-kl.de/glimmer2.02) (8) and FGENESB (http://softberry.com) (34) for automatic annotation and EditSeq (DNAstar) for manual confirmation. Potential ORFs were compared against the NCBI protein databases using the BLASTP nonredundant database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/). The cos sequence was identified as described previously (26).
F108 integration.
Analysis of the F108 sequence revealed the presence of a 96-bp region, located upstream of the integrase gene, which shows high homology at the nucleotide level with P. multocida t33 tRNALeu. Oligonucleotides attRF108 (5'-CAAGTTTTCAGCAGACCC-3'), attRPM (5'-ACTTGGTGGTATGTTGGG-3'), attLF108 (5'-AGACAATTGACGCAGACG-3'), and attLPM (5'-ACAACCTTGCCAAGGTTG-3') were designed and used to identify the F108 integration sites in the chromosomes of 12 independent lysogenic P. multocida strains, as well as to determine the attR and attL regions.
Transduction with F108.
Spontaneous rifampin-, streptomycin-, and nalidixic acid-resistant mutants of strain PM403 were used to obtain donor lysates (Table 1). For transduction experiments, 5 ml of each lysate at 109 PFU/ml (which had previously been treated with DNase I at 10 µg/ml) was added to a 5-ml culture of strain PM403 at an optical density at 600 nm of 0.2, resulting in a multiplicity of infection of about 3 PFU/CFU. After incubation for 30 min at 37°C without agitation and for 45 min at the same temperature with agitation, samples were plated in BHI with the suitable antibiotic. As controls, aliquots of both noninfected PM403 cell suspensions and F108 lysates were plated on the same medium.
Pathogenicity assays.
Female Swiss mice (3 weeks old) obtained from Harlan Iberica Inc. (Barcelona, Spain) and housed under specific-pathogen-free conditions were used for these studies. Bacteria were grown on SBAP prior to infection. The 50% lethal doses (LD50) of PM403 and its F108-lysogenic derivative (strain PM1090) were determined in triplicate as reported previously (12). Basically, groups of five mice were injected intraperitoneally with 0.1 ml of serial 10-fold dilutions of bacteria in buffered peptone water. The concentration of the original bacterial suspensions was determined by the plate count method. The number of animals that survived at 2 weeks postinoculation was recorded, and the LD50 was calculated as described previously (21).
Nucleotide sequence accession number.
The entire nucleotide sequence of bacteriophage F108 has been deposited in GenBank under accession number DQ114220.
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FIG. 1. Transmission electron micrograph of bacteriophage F108 particles.
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FIG. 2. Schematic representation of the bacteriophage F108 genome. ORFs are numbered consecutively from left to right and are indicated by arrows. Putative functions are also shown. White arrows indicate ORFs that display the highest similarity with H. influenzae bacteriophage HP1 or HP2. Black arrows indicate ORFs that show the highest similarity with other bacteriophages different from HP1 or HP2 (see Table 2). Gray arrows indicate ORFs that share no homology in BLAST-P searches.
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TABLE 2. Codon usage in P. multocida and bacteriophage F108
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TABLE 3. Description of bacteriophage F108 ORFs, gene products, and functional assignments
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FIG. 3. Sequence comparison of the cI and Cox binding sites of bacteriophages F108, HP1, and HP2. White arrows indicate the cI and cox genes. Black arrows represent either the lysogeny promoter (pL) or the two lysis promoters (pR1 and pR2) from which the cI and cox genes are transcribed, respectively. Boxes contain the sequence of either the Cox or the cI binding site for each bacteriophage. The distance relative to either the cI or the cox translational start codon is given in parentheses.
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Detailed analysis of the F108 phage genome reveals the absence of genes encoding known pathogenic factors. In agreement, the pathogenicity of P. multocida cells is not increased when they are lysogenic for F108. Thus, when analyzed as described in Materials and Methods, both PM403 and its lysogenic derivative (PM1090) display the same LD50 (1.37 x 107 CFU/animal).
Identification of bacteriophage F108 integration site.
As cited above, temperate bacteriophages may be used to construct insertional plasmids which are widely used to obtain strains with new biotechnological characteristics (9, 13, 35). With the aim of further enabling the construction of this kind of vector for P. multocida, the F108 phage integration site was determined.
When the whole-genome sequence of F108 was used as query in a BLAST-N analysis, a 95-bp region common to the P. multocida chromosome sequence (15) was detected. In the bacteriophage DNA, this region is upstream of the integrase-encoding gene. Moreover, this region is between bp 1169740 and 1169646 of the P. multocida PM70 genome sequence, which carries the 3' end of the t33 tRNALeu and the promoter region of the PM0996 locus, encoding a hypothetical protein. In order to determine whether this region was the F108 integration site, PCR experiments were carried out with two sets of primers designed to read out from the prophage sequence to the genome of the lysogenic cell (Fig. 4a). The results obtained indicate that a PCR band is detected with each one of two pairs of primers when DNA from lysogenic cells is analyzed but not when DNA from either isolated phage or nonlysogenic cells is used (Fig. 4a). The same results were obtained when 10 additional lysogenic strains isolated in independent experiments were tested (data not shown).
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FIG. 4. (a) Determination of the bacteriophage F108 integration site. PCR analyses were performed using attRF108 and attRPM oligonucleotides and chromosomal DNAs from PM108 (original source of bacteriophage F108), PM403 (a non-F108-lysogenic strain), PM1090 (F108 lysogenic strain, obtained in this work), and bacteriophage F108. The black arrow indicates the presence of the 1,446-bp amplification product. Lambda BstXI-digested DNA was used as a size marker (MW). (b) Diagram showing the F108 integration site in a P. multocida-F108 lysogenic strain. attR and attL positions are shown. Small arrows indicate the locations of oligonucleotides used to determine either attR or attL sequences. The phage F108 genome is enclosed by brackets. Comparison of attL, attR, attB, and attP sequences is also shown. Differences in those regions are boxed and indicated by arrows. Each sequence was determined, at least twice, for both coding and noncoding strands. (c) Schematic representation of the bacterial (attB) and bacteriophage (attP) integration regions in the P. multocida and bacteriophage F108 genomes, respectively. Both attB and attP are boxed. PM0996 encodes a hypothetical protein.
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F108-mediated transduction of chromosomal markers.
There are practically no data about the ability of phages presenting cohesive ends to carry out generalized transduction. In fact, this question has been extensively analyzed only for the E. coli bacteriophage
(28). Thus, it has been reported that production of generalized transduction particles by
requires inactivation of its redB gene, encoding an exonuclease (24). Moreover, it has been largely demonstrated that the host chromosome is packaged in generalized transducing particles when the headful cutting system of phage DNA concatemers recognizes pseudo-pac sequences in the bacterial DNA (29, 30, 31). Furthermore, the cos-based packaging strategy implies a high-level specificity of DNA recognition which makes it difficult to produce generalized transducing particles.
Although, as described above, phage F108 presents cos ends, two specific characteristics make it different from bacteriophage
. The first is the absence of a redB-homologous gene. The second is the fact that the F108 cos sequence is shorter than that of
, increasing the putative presence of cos-like sequences in the whole P. multocida genome. In fact, mathematical evaluation of the a priori probability of finding a particular 10-bp sequence (like the F108 cos region) puts it at 1/410, whereas the probability goes down to 1/412 for a 12-bp sequence (such as the
cos region).
As a consequence of these two factors, analysis of the generalized transduction ability of phage F108 was carried out using three different chromosomal markers, gyrA, rpoB, and rpsL, which are spread along the P. multocida genome (Table 4). The results indicate that F108 is able to transduce all of these markers, showing frequencies of 107 to 108 transductants per CFU. Reversion of these markers was also determined in the absence of F108 infection as a control. In all cases, transduction frequencies are about 100-fold higher than spontaneous rates (Table 4). It is known that in H. influenzae, a member of the Pasteurellaceae family, rifampin-resistant mutants present an amino acid substitution in the ß subunit of the RNA polymerase (encoded by the rpoB gene), located at codon 513, 516, 518, 526, or 533 (6). The chromosomal DNA sequences of the rpoB genes from 10 P. multocida rifampin-resistant transductants revealed that all of them showed the same substitution (Asp-516
Val-516) as the rifampin-resistant strain PM1092, used as a donor in the F108-mediated transduction experiments.
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TABLE 4. F108 bacteriophage transduction frequencies of several chromosomal markers encoding antibiotic resistance
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We are deeply grateful to Ignacio Badiola and Montserrat Saco for generously providing us with P. multocida strains and to our English-teaching university colleague, Chuck Simmons, for help in the language revision and correction of this article. We acknowledge Joan Ruiz and Pilar Cortés for excellent technical assistance.
J.A. and S.C. should be regarded as joint first authors of this work. ![]()
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