A Shift in Central Metabolism Accompanies Virulence Activation in Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Abstract

The rise of antibiotic resistance requires the development of new strategies to combat bacterial infection and pathogenesis. A major direction has been the development of drugs that broadly target virulence. However, few targets have been identified due to the species-specific nature of many virulence regulators. The lack of a virulence regulator that is conserved across species has presented a further challenge to the development of therapeutics. Here, we identify that NADH activity has an important role in the induction of virulence in the pathogen P. aeruginosa . This finding, coupled with the ubiquity of NADH in bacterial pathogens, opens up the possibility of targeting enzymes that process NADH as a potential broad antivirulence approach.