Escherichia coli Raw sequence reads. Escherichia coli

Bile salts are secreted into the intestine to aid fat digestion and confer antimicrobial protection. Sodium deoxycholate (DOC) is the most potent antimicrobial agent among them. However, Gram-negative pathogens, such as Escherichia coli, are highly resistant to DOC, using multiple mechanisms of which the multidrug efflux pump AcrAB-TolC is the dominant one. In this study, we sought to identify targets of DOC by identifying genes involved in DOC sensitivity in the absence of functional efflux pumps (in ∆tolC background), using a mutant screen that selected twenty independent spontaneous mutants that had a higher MIC for DOC than the E. coli parental strain.