Pseudomonas aeruginosa UCBPP-PA14 transcriptome of wild-type and ?hepP

The project is focused on analyzing the transcriptome of the Pseudomonas aeruginosa strain UCBPP-PA14 (PA14) and a PA14 mutant defective in the heparinase encoding gene hepP. Earlier studies showed that when grown in blood from severely burned patients, hepP expression in Pseudomonas aeruginosa increases significantly. Additional studies using the murine model of thermal injury revealed that in comparison with its parent strain, PA14 ?hepP mutant was avirulent. The mutant failed spread within the body thermally inured/infected mice. We conducted several experiments to delineate this mechanism by analyzing the expression of some virulence genes. However, the expression of those genes was not affected by the hepP mutation. We therefore conducted the RNA-Seq experiment to determine the genes whose expression is affected (directly or indirectly) by the hepP mutation.