Staphylococcus aureus is an eminent human pathogen that can colonize the human host and cause severe life-threatening illnesses. This bacterium can reside in and infect a wide range of host tissues, ranging from superficial surfaces like the skin to deeper tissues such as in the gastrointestinal tract, heart and bones. Due to its multifaceted lifestyle, S. aureus uses complex regulatory networks to sense diverse signals that enable it to adapt to different environments and modulate virulence. In this minireview, we explore well-characterized environmental and host cues that S. aureus responds to and describe how this pathogen modulates virulence in response to these signals. Lastly, we highlight therapeutic approaches undertaken by several groups to inhibit both signaling and the cognate regulators that sense and transmit these signals downstream.

Staphylococcus aureus is a versatile bacterial pathogen that can cause significant disease burden and mortality. Like other pathogens, S. aureus must adapt to its environment to produce virulence factors to survive the immune responses evoked by infection. Despite the importance of environmental signals for S. aureus pathogenicity, only a limited number of these signals have been investigated in detail for their ability to modulate virulence. Here we show that pyruvate, a central metabolite, causes alterations in the overall metabolic flux of S. aureus and enhances its pathogenicity. We demonstrate that pyruvate induces the production of virulence factors such as the pore-forming leucocidins and that this induction results in increased virulence of community-acquired methicillin-resistant S. aureus (CA-MRSA) clone USA300. Specifically, we show that an efficient “pyruvate response” requires the activation of S. aureus master regulators AgrAC and SaeRS as well as the ArlRS two-component system. Altogether, our report further establishes a strong relationship between metabolism and virulence and identifies pyruvate as a novel regulatory signal for the coordination of the S. aureus virulon through intricate regulatory networks.

The RNA interference (RNAi) pathway in animal cells can be harnessed to silence gene expression with artificial small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) or transgenes that express small hairpin RNAs (shRNAs). The transgene-expressing shRNA approach has been adapted into large-scale resources for genome-wide loss-of-function screens, whereas focused studies on a narrow set of genes can be achieved by using individual shRNA constructs from these resources. Although current shRNA repositories generally work, they might fail in certain situations and therefore necessitate other alternatives. We detail here a new highly-accessible and rational design of custom shRNAs that utilizes a refined backbone configuration termed the ‘Organic’ shRNA (OshR) platform. The OshR platform is ‘organic’ because it conforms more naturally to the endogenous vertebrate miRNAs by maintaining specific bulges and incorporating strategic mismatches to insure the desired guide strand is produced while reducing the accumulation of passenger strands that might contribute to off-target effects. We also demonstrate that the reliability of the OshR platform for gene silencing is increased when sequences target the 3' UnTranslated Region (3'UTR) of a gene. We further compare the OshR platform with the current and emerging shRNA designs, and propose that the OshR platform is a novel approach that can allow investigators to generate custom and effective shRNAs for individual gene functional studies.