Abstract
Members of the bacterial genus Pseudomonas form mutualistic, commensal, and pathogenic associations with diverse hosts. The prevalence of host association across the genus suggests that symbiosis may be a conserved ancestral trait and that distinct symbiotic lifestyles may be more recently evolved. Here we show that the ColR/S two-component system, part of the Pseudomonas core genome, is functionally conserved between Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Pseudomonas fluorescens. Using plant rhizosphere colonization and virulence in a murine abscess model, we show that colR is required for commensalism with plants and virulence in animals. Comparative transcriptomics revealed that the ColR regulon has diverged between P. aeruginosa and P. fluorescens and deleting components of the ColR regulon revealed strain-specific, but not host-specific, requirements for ColR-dependent genes. Collectively, our results suggest that ColR/S allows Pseudomonas to sense and respond to a host, but that the ColR-regulon has diverged between Pseudomonas strains with distinct lifestyles. This suggests that conservation of two-component systems, coupled with life-style dependent diversification of the regulon, may play a role in host association and lifestyle transitions.
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Data availability
The P. fluorescens WCS365 genome assembly and annotation have been deposited in the National Centre for Biotechnology Information BioProject database under accession CP089973. The RNA-Seq raw sequencing has been deposited in the National Center for Biotechnology Information Gene Expression Omnibus database under accession GSE190448.
Code availability
The code used for RNA-Seq analysis is available from the Haney laboratory GitHub repository https://github.com/haneylab/ColR_paper_RNAseq_analysis.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a CIHR Grant (PJT - 169051), NSERC Discovery Grant (NSERC-RGPIN-2016-04121), and a Canada Research Chair salary award to CHH. REWH was funded by a CIHR foundation grant (FDN-154287) and received salary support from a Canada Research Chair and UBC Killam Professorship. YZ was supported by an NSERC CGS-M and CLW was supported by an NSERC CGS-D award. DT is supported by an NSF postdoctoral fellowship in Biology (IOS-2010946). MA is supported by a Vanier graduate scholarship. DP was supported by a fellowship from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research. We thank Drs. Fred Ausubel and Alina Gutu for conversations that lead to the conception of this project.
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Conceptualization, CW, YZ, DP, REWH, and CHH; Methodology, CW and JZ; Formal Analysis, CW, YZ, MA, CDH, MED, AW, DP, and CHH; Investigation, CW, YZ, MA, CDH, MAD, DT, MED, and DP; Resources, REWH and CHH; Data Curation, CW, YZ, AW, and CHH; Writing – Original draft, CW, JZ, and CHH; Writing – Reviewing and Editing, all; Visualization, CW, JZ, MA, CDH, DT, DP, and CHH; Supervision, CHH, DP, and REWH; Funding Acquisition, CHH, and REWH.
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Wiesmann, C.L., Zhang, Y., Alford, M. et al. The ColR/S two-component system is a conserved determinant of host association across Pseudomonas species. ISME J 17, 286–296 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-022-01343-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-022-01343-3
