Comparison of SCOTS and standard microarray protocol

Legionella pneumophila is the causative agent of Legionnaires’ disease, an acute pulmonary infection. L. pneumophila is able to infect and multiply in both phagocytic protozoan, such as Acanthamoeba castellanii, and mammalian professional phagocytes. The best-known virulence determinant used by L. pneumophila to infect host cells is a Type IVb translocation system named Icm/Dot, which is used to modify the host cell functions to the benefit of the bacteria. To date the Icm/Dot systeme is known to translocate more than 100 effectors. While the transcriptional response of Legionella to the intracellular environement of A. castelannii as already been investigated, much less is known of how Legionella reacts transcriptionnally inside human macrophages. In this study, the transcriptome of L. pneumophila was monitored during exponential and post-exponential phase in rich AYE broth and during infection of human cultured macrophages by using microarray and a RNA amplification procedure called SCOTS to allow for the study of conditions of low bacterial loads. Among the genes induced intracellularly are those involved in amino acid synthesis pathway leading to L-arginine, L-histidne and L-proline as well as many transport system involved in amino acid and iron uptake. The Icm/Dot systems is not differentially expressed inside cells compare to the E phase control but the effectors are strongly induced. The intracellular transcriptome was further used to identify putative new Icm/Dot effectors and translocation was show to occur for 3 of them. This study provides a comprehensive view of how L. pneumophila react to the human macrophages intracellular environment. To validate the use of SCOTS, we compare the expression patterns obtained by SCOTS to those obtained when a standard microarray protocol was used. RNA from bacteria in E phase was treated using SCOTS or a standard microarray protocol where the cDNA is labeled during the reverse transcription reaction as previously published. The resulting cDNA was hybridized to the microarray slides as described previously and data analysis was carried out the same way as for the SCOTS treated samples.