Abstract
Phase variation (PV) is a well-known phenomenon of high-frequency reversible gene-expression switching. PV arises from genetic and epigenetic mechanisms and confers a range of benefits to bacteria, constituting both an innate immune strategy to infection from bacteriophages as well as an adaptation strategy within an infected host. PV has been well-characterized in numerous bacterial species; however, there is limited direct evidence of PV in the human opportunistic pathogen Staphylococcus aureus. This review provides an overview of the mechanisms that generate PV and focuses on earlier and recent findings of PV in S. aureus, with a brief look at the future of the field.
Highlights
These selective pressures are often focused on bacterial external proteins which form the first line of contact with the outside environment and this has led to development of what have been termed “contingency loci” [14,15]
Considering the above information, it can be inferred that genetic loci susceptible to Phase Variation (PV) would be found in abundance amongst bacterial species that experience population bottlenecks
Upon investigating the phenomenon of hemolytic heterogeneity commonly observed in S. aureus, we identified PV-controlled reversible shutdown of the central virulence regulatory system, the Accessory Gene Regulator (Agr) system [90]
Summary
To better combat this dangerous pathogen it is vitally important to study adaptation mechanisms of S. aureus Another particular trait of S. aureus that makes it notoriously difficult to combat in the clinical setting is phenotypic heterogeneity. An example of this is the phenomenon of persister cells, where sub-populations of S. aureus gain a resistance phenotype against antibiotic treatment resulting from arrested growth [10]. Microorganisms 2021, 9, 244 characterized by auxotrophy for various compounds involved in the electron transport chain and slow growth, allowing them to escape the effects of many antibiotics [11,12] These populations do not acquire conventional resistance mechanisms against the antibiotics. We summarize the information regarding bacterial Phase Variation (PV), a mechanism of high-frequency reversible gene expression switching (Section 2) and collate the known examples of S. aureus PV into one source (Section 3) to aid in future studies on heterogeneity in S. aureus (Section 4)
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