A compendium of antibiotic-induced transcription profiles reveals broad regulation of P. multocida virulence genes

Treatment of bacteria with antibiotics at or close to the inhibitory concentration leads to specific transcriptional responses often affecting target genes and targets pathways. A dataset of transcriptional profiles (compendium) induced by antibiotics with known mode-of-action (MoA) can be used to gain information on the putative MoA of novel substances with unknown MoAs. We used a Pasteurella multocida microarray to generate a compendium of transcriptional profiles and to obtain information on the putative MoA of a novel antibiotic compound. We also show a strong impact of the bacteriostatic antibiotics on P. multocida virulence gene transcription. Keywords: antibiotica treatment, time course Midlog-grown cultures of P. multocida were treated for 10 or 30 min with 8 different antibiotics and one novel compound (thiazin) at minimal inhibitory concentrations (MICs) and were harvested. Control bacteria were not-treated and harvested at approximately the same optical density an OD578 of ~ 0.5. Total RNA was extracted from these samples and labelled with biotin. P. multocida whole genome transcriptional profiling was performed by hybridization on the custom-made Affymetrix microarray according to the manufacturer’s instructions. The experiments were done in triplicates.