Urinary tract infections impose substantial health burdens on women worldwide. Urinary tract infections often incur a high risk of recurrence and antibiotic resistance, and uropathogenic E. coli accounts for approximately 80% of clinically acquired cases. The diagnosis of, treatment of, and drug development for urinary tract infections remain substantial challenges due to the complex pathogenesis of this condition. The clinically isolated UPEC 83972 strain was found to produce four siderophores: yersiniabactin, aerobactin, salmochelin, and enterobactin. The biosyntheses of some of these siderophores implies that the virulence of UPEC is mediated via the targeting of primary metabolism. However, the differential modulatory roles of siderophore biosyntheses on the differential metabolomes of UPEC and non-UPEC strains remain incompletely understood. In the present study, we sought to investigate how the differential metabolomes can be used to distinguish UPEC from non-UPEC strains and to determine the associated regulatory roles of siderophore biosynthesis. Our results are the first to demonstrate that the identified differential metabolomes strongly differentiated UPEC from non-UPEC strains. Furthermore, we performed metabolome assays of mutants with different patterns of siderophore deletions; the data revealed that the mutations of all four siderophores exerted a stronger modulatory role on the differential metabolomes of the UPEC and non-UPEC strains relative to the mutation of any single siderophore and that this modulatory role primarily involved amino acid metabolism, oxidative phosphorylation in the carbon fixation pathway, and purine and pyrimidine metabolism. Surprisingly, the modulatory roles were strongly dependent on the type and number of mutated siderophores. Taken together, these results demonstrated that siderophore biosynthesis coordinately modulated the differential metabolomes and thus may indicate novel targets for virulence-based diagnosis, therapeutics, and drug development related to urinary tract infections.

Uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC) growth in women’s bladders during urinary tract infection (UTI) incurs substantial chemical exchange, termed the “interactive metabolome”, which primarily accounts for the metabolic costs (utilized metabolome) and metabolic donations (excreted metabolome) between UPEC and human urine. Here, we attempted to identify the individualized interactive metabolome between UPEC and human urine. We were able to distinguish UPEC from non-UPEC by employing a combination of metabolomics and genetics. Our results revealed that the interactive metabolome between UPEC and human urine was markedly different from that between non-UPEC and human urine, and that UPEC triggered much stronger perturbations in the interactive metabolome in human urine. Furthermore, siderophore biosynthesis coordinately modulated the individualized interactive metabolome, which we found to be a critical component of UPEC virulence. The individualized virulence-associated interactive metabolome contained 31 different metabolites and 17 central metabolic pathways that were annotated to host these different metabolites, including energetic metabolism, amino acid metabolism, and gut microbe metabolism. Changes in the activities of these pathways mechanistically pinpointed the virulent capability of siderophore biosynthesis. Together, our findings provide novel insights into UPEC virulence, and we propose that siderophores are potential targets for further discovery of drugs to treat UPEC-induced UTI.

Siderophores are chemically diverse secondary metabolites that primarily assist the host organisms to chelate iron. Siderophores are biosynthesized by many biological organisms, including bacteria, fungi, and plants and they are responsible for a variety of biological functions beyond capture iron. Thus, they could provide a novel understanding of host-pathogen interactions, plant physiology, disease pathogenesis, and drug development. However, knowledge gaps in analytical technologies, chemistry, and biology have severely impeded the applications of siderophores, and a new strategy is urgently needed to bridge these gaps. Mass spectrometry (MS) and associated technologies render unparalleled advantages in this niche in terms of high throughput, resolution, and sensitivity. Herein, this critical review briefly summarizes progress in the study of siderophores and specifically identifies MS-based novel strategies that attempt to mimic the complexity of siderophore systems in order to increase the applicability of these compounds in the scientific community. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Mass Spec Rev 37:188-201, 2018.