Abstract
The genus Bacillus includes species with diverse natural histories, including free-living nonpathogenic heterotrophs such as B. subtilis and host-dependent pathogens such as B. anthracis (the etiological agent of the disease anthrax) and B. cereus, a cause of food poisoning. Although highly similar genotypically, the ecological niches of these three species are mutually exclusive, which raises the untested hypothesis that their metabolism has speciated along a nutritional tract. Here, we developed a pipeline for quantitative total assessment of the use of diverse sources of carbon for general metabolism to better appreciate the “culinary preferences” of three distinct Bacillus species, as well as related Staphylococcus aureus. We show that each species has widely varying metabolic ability to utilize diverse sources of carbon that correlated to their ecological niches. This approach was applied to the growth and survival of B. anthracis in a blood-like environment and find metabolism shifts from sugar to amino acids as the preferred source of energy. Finally, various nutrients in broth and host-like environments are identified that may promote or interfere with bacterial metabolism during infection.
Highlights
The genus Bacillus includes species with diverse natural histories, including free-living nonpathogenic heterotrophs such as B. subtilis and host-dependent pathogens such as B. anthracis and B. cereus, a cause of food poisoning
In an attempt to define the nutritional preferences of pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria, we examined the ability of three species of Bacillus (B. anthracis, B. cereus, and B. subtilis), as well as Staphylococcus aureus, to utilize 189 distinct sources of carbon in Biolog’s Phenotype Microarray (PM1 and 2) carbon utilization plates designed to emphasize metabolic output arising from differences in metabolic setup
We sought to determine whether the maximum metabolic rate could be used as a metric to compare bacterial nutrient preferences under different environmental conditions for Bacillus anthracis Sterne, Bacillus cereus ATCC 10987, Bacillus subtilis ATCC 2091, and Staphylococcus aureus LAC (Supplementary Fig. S1a)
Summary
The genus Bacillus includes species with diverse natural histories, including free-living nonpathogenic heterotrophs such as B. subtilis and host-dependent pathogens such as B. anthracis (the etiological agent of the disease anthrax) and B. cereus, a cause of food poisoning. Spores germinate inside the host into fully-replicative and growing vegetative cells This life cycle is in stark contrast to Bacillus cereus, a member of Bacillus cereus sensu lato group, which usually causes mild symptoms still capable of causing severe pathologies[18,19,20,21] Another extensively studied Bacillus species, Bacillus subtilis, is a non-pathogenic soil-dwelling bacteria utilized for food fermentation and the study of bacterial physiology. In an attempt to define the nutritional preferences of pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria, we examined the ability of three species of Bacillus (B. anthracis, B. cereus, and B. subtilis), as well as Staphylococcus aureus, to utilize 189 distinct sources of carbon in Biolog’s Phenotype Microarray (PM1 and 2) carbon utilization plates designed to emphasize metabolic output arising from differences in metabolic setup. We report the generation of a robust classification scheme that bins metabolic output as a function of chemical class, the use of this system to decipher nutrient preferences between species, how such preferences change in a host-like environment, and the identification of compounds that may poison metabolic networks
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