Assessment of whole genome fitness of bacterial pathogens during stress conditions

The project assesses genome-scale fitness of the Hyphomicrobiales pathogens, Agrobacterium tumefaciens str. C58 and Brucella abortus S19 during growth in diverse media and environmentally stressful conditions. The approach utilized comparative transposon sequencing (TnSeq) in which a saturated transposon mutagenized library of each bacterial species was cultivated in stressful conditions of cell-wall targeting antibiotics or antimicrobial peptides, or shocked with a potent acidic or oxidative stress . A. tumefaciens transposon mutants were grown in either the defined media, A. tumefaciens Glucose and Nitrogen (ATGN), or complex media 2x yeast-tryptone (2YT). B. abortus was cultivated in 2YT only. The sequenced transposon insertion data generated from each condition was then compared to observe the under or over-representation of each gene.