Transcriptional responses of Neisseria gonorrhoeae to glucose and lactate: implications for resistance to oxidative damage and biofilm formation

Carbon catabolite repression (CCR) is a gene regulation process that allows bacteria to use carbon-energy sources in a hierarchical manner. Thus, the presence of a preferred sugar, usually D-glucose, results in downregulation of genes participating in the transport and catabolic pathways of secondary carbon sources. Further, CCR controls the expression of global regulators that control expression of many genes involved in multiple aspects of bacterial physiology such as stress response proteins and virulence factors. The human-restricted pathogen Neisseria gonorrhoeae can rely upon a limited number of carbon-energy sources, including glucose and lactate and both are available within its infection niches. We recently reported that expression of the L-lactate permease-encoding gene lctP is subjected to glucose repression within physiological concentrations. However, the transducing mechanism or the gene that connect glucose with lctP promoter repression remained unknown. To address this issue, we performed an RNA-Seq analysis to determine the transcriptional landscape of gonococci due to changes in glucose or lactate concentrations in the growth media. Glucose was found to regulate 144 genes (5.5% of total genes in the genome) while lactate influenced the expression of 434 (16.5%) genes with an overlap of 97 genes between the two sugars. Both, glucose and lactate were found to upregulate genes involved in protein translation, a high energy consumption cellular function. Individually, glucose enhanced genes participating in glycolysis and repressed genes in the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, while lactate enhanced genes encoding respiratory enzymes and ATP synthase. Interestingly, lactate was found to repress expression of several genes encoding known gonococcal virulence factors such as tbpAB encoding the transferrin-binding proteins; the tonB and exbBD genes encoding the membrane energy transfer complex TonB-ExbB-ExbD required for many outer membrane transport systems; katA encoding an important H2O2-inducible catalase and to upregulate mtrR encoding the master repressor of the mtrCDE antimicrobial efflux pump genes. Moreover, glucose repressed mntC encoding a Zn/Mn ABC transporter and lctP, both required for resistance to killing by H2O2. These results set the framework to determine important gonococci virulent factor genes whose expression can be modulated by CCR as well as to discover the corresponding CCR regulators that control such genes. Overall design: Total RNA samples (8 samples) were isolated from N. gonorrhoeae strain FA19 grown to mid-exponential phase (OD600 0.5-0.7), depleted from ribosomal RNA and subjected to single-end high throughput sequencing on the Illumina NextSeq 500 platform (Illumina Inc., San Diego, CA). Transcript differential expression analyses were conducted between the transcriptomes of FA19 cells grown in GC-broth supplemented with two D-glucose concentrations 1 and 10 mM, and between bacteria grown in GC-broth supplemented with L-lactate 1 or 10 mM. Each condition (sugar concentration) was sequenced in duplicates.