Maltose-1-Phosphate Stress Stimulon in Mycobacterium tuberculosis

New chemotherapeutics are urgently required to control the tuberculosis pandemic fueled by the emergence of multidrug- and extensively-drug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains and the bacterium`s catastrophic alliance with HIV. Here we describe a novel trehalose-to-α-glucan pathway in M. tuberculosis comprising four enzymatic steps mediated by TreS, Pep2, GlgB, and GlgE, identified as an essential maltosyltransferase capable of utilizing maltose 1-phosphate. Using traditional and chemical reverse genetics, we show that GlgE inactivation causes rapid death of M. tuberculosis in vitro and in mice, through self-poisoning by maltose 1-phosphate accumulation driven by a self-amplifying feedback loop promoting pleiotropic phosphosugar-induced stress responses. Moreover, this α-glucan pathway exhibited a synthetic lethal interaction with the glucosyltransferase Rv3032 involved in biosynthesis of specialized α-glucan derivatives. The unique combination of gene essentiality within a synthetic lethal pathway validates GlgE as a new class of drug targets, revealing novel synergistic mechanisms to induce death in M. tuberculosis. Transcriptional profiling was performed to characterize the lethality induced by maltose 1-phosphate accumulation. Triplicate 10 mL cultures of the conditional lethal Mtb mutant strain H37Rv Delta treS Delta glgE (pMV361::treS) and of the vector control strain H37Rv Delta treS Delta glgE (pMV361) were grown in liquid culture to log-phase in the presence of 5 mM validamycin A (VA) to suppress M1P formation. Subsequently, cells were washed to remove the inhibitor; after 48 h of starvation for VA cultures were harvested. Keywords: tuberculosis, trehalose, compound treatment design, genetic modification design, and stimulus or stress design Three biological replicates with one dye-flip