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Staphylococcus aureus ST1 promotes persistent urinary tract infection by highly expressing the urease

Kai Xu, Yanan Wang, Ying Jian, Tianchi Chen, Qian Liu, Hua Wang, Min Li, Lei He

Frontiers in Microbiology, 2023

27 citations

Abstract

Staphylococcus aureus (SA) is a relatively uncommon cause of urinary tract infections (UTIs) in the general population. Although rare, S. aureus- induced UTIs are prone to potentially life-threatening invasive infections such as bacteremia. To investigate the molecular epidemiology, phenotypic characteristics, and pathophysiology of S. aureus- induced UTIs, we analyzed non-repetitive 4,405 S. aureus isolates collected from various clinical sources from 2008 to 2020 from a general hospital in Shanghai, China. Among these, 193 isolates (4.38%) were cultivated from the midstream urine specimens. Epidemiological analysis showed UTI-derived ST1 (UTI-ST1) and UTI-ST5 are the primary sequence types of UTI-SA. Furthermore, we randomly selected 10 isolates from each of the UTI-ST1, non-UTI-ST1 (nUTI-ST1), and UTI-ST5 groups to characterize their in vitro and in vivo phenotypes. The in vitro phenotypic assays revealed that UTI-ST1 exhibits an obvious decline in hemolysis of human red blood cells and increased biofilm and adhesion in the urea-supplemented medium, compared to the medium without urea, while UTI-ST5 and nUTI-ST1 did not show significant differences between the biofilm-forming and adhesion abilities. In addition, the UTI-ST1 displayed intense urease activities by highly expressing urease genes, indicating the potential role of urease in UTI-ST1 survival and persistence. Furthermore, in vitro virulence assays using the UTI-ST1 ureC mutant showed no significant difference in…

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