[SCAN] Study of bacterial infection recoursing to NMR metabolomics

Title: Study of bacterial infection recoursing to NMR metabolomics

Speaker: Luís Gafeira

Affiliation: Ana Coelho Lab

Abstract:

Bacterial infections are one of the major concerns in public health.

There is scarce knowledge about the metabolic remodelling that bacteria need to perform during the infection process. Metabolomics is the study of small compounds, metabolites, present in living organisms and their changes. Metabolites can be viewed as the end-points of the generality of the biological processes thus representing a reliable fingerprint of the organism status. In this presentation, it will be present two studies where NMR metabolomics was used to gain insights about bacterial infection.

In the first study, untargeted 1H-NMR metabolomics was used to understand the impact of BolA, an important transcription factor, on the metabolic profile of Salmonella Typhimurium under virulence conditions.

The NMR analysis of cell extracts of S. Typhimurium strains with different BolA levels indicates that BolA regulates pathways related to stress resistance and virulence, being an important modulator of the metabolic processes needed for S. Typhimurium infection.

In the second study, the metabolome changes of two strains of Staphylococcus epidermidis, an infectious and a non-infectious strain, were studied at skin pH (5.5), at blood pH (7.4) and at passage of skin to blood pH (5.5 to 7.4). This last condition simulating the invasion process. NMR metabolomics allowed to distinguish the two strains at the three conditions and reveals that diverse metabolic processes are important in the pH adaptation of the two strains.