Flagellum and toxin phase variation impacts intestinal colonization and disease development in a mouse model of Clostridioides difficile infection

Abstract

Clostridioides difficile is a major nosocomial pathogen that can cause severe, toxin-mediated diarrhea and pseudomembranous colitis. Recent work has shown that C. difficile exhibits heterogeneity in swimming motility and toxin production in vitro through phase variation by site-specific DNA recombination. The recombinase RecV reversibly inverts the flagellar switch sequence upstream of the flgB operon, leading to the ON/OFF expression of flagellum and toxin genes. How this phenomenon impacts C. difficile virulence in vivo remains unknown. We identified mutations in the right inverted repeat that reduced or prevented flagellar switch inversion by RecV. We introduced these mutations into C. difficile R20291 to create strains with the flagellar switch locked in either the ON or OFF orientation. These mutants exhibited a loss of flagellum and toxin phase variation during growth in vitro, yielding precisely modified mutants suitable for assessing virulence in vivo. In a hamster model of acute C. difficile infection, the phase-locked ON mutants accumulated significantly more toxins than the phase locked OFF mutants but did not differ significantly in the ability to cause acute disease symptoms. In contrast, in a mouse model, preventing flagellum and toxin phase variation affected the ability of C. difficile to colonize the intestinal tract and to elicit weight loss, which is attributable to differences in toxin production during infection. These results show that the ability of C. difficile to phase vary flagella and toxins influences colonization and disease development and suggest that the phenotypic variants generated by flagellar switch inversion have distinct capacities for causing disease.

Multiple Regulatory Mechanisms Control the Production of CmrRST, an Atypical Signal Transduction System in Clostridioides difficile

“…1B ). Prior work determined that mutating the equivalent residues in the flagellar switch RIR eliminated switch inversion, resulting in phase-locked strains ( 39 ). We recovered independent mutants with the cmr switch in either orientation and designated them cmr -Δ3 ON and cmr- Δ3 OFF.…”