The efflux pump AcrAB is important in the antibiotic resistance and virulence of several pathogenic bacteria. We report that deletion of the Yersinia pestis AcrAB-TolC homolog leads to increased susceptibility to diverse substrates, including, though unlike in Escherichia coli, the aminoglycosides. Neither is the Y. pestis pump affected by the efflux pump inhibitor phenylalanine-arginine beta-naphthylamide. In mouse plague models, pump deletion does not have a significant effect on tissue colonization.
Increased activity of efflux pumps is a major route to decreased susceptibility (8,15,21,22,39,41) in many bacteria. An important pump in active efflux is 35). TolC is located in the outer membrane and is linked to the inner membrane AcrB through AcrA, thus forming a channel from the cytoplasm to the extracellular space (25). AcrAB-TolC has an extremely broad substrate range but favors lipophilic substrates (25). Efflux pumps are also involved in the pathogenicity of several bacteria, including Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium, Vibrio cholerae, Francisella tularensis, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and the plant pathogen Erwinia amylovora (3, 27, 30); although not fully understood, the pumps could affect virulence through removal of antibacterial molecules such as bile (25), mammalian steroid hormones (7), and antimicrobial peptides (34, 37, 40) and therefore would aid survival in the host.To explore the function of the AcrAB-TolC pump in susceptibility of Yersinia pestis to antibiotics and virulence, deletion and complemented strains were engineered using splicing by overlap extension, as described previously (11,19), in the attenuated Y. pestis strain KIM 1001 pgm (18), a gift from John Goguen (University of Massachusetts Medical School). Sites of genetic manipulation were verified by sequencing. Growth studies showed no difference in the doubling times of the engineered strains compared with that of the wild-type (WT) strain (data not shown).Drug susceptibility studies were carried out using Etests (AB Biodisk) against antibiotics from different classes, including antibiotics favored in plague treatment and prophylaxis (streptomycin, gentamicin, tetracycline, chloramphenicol, ciprofloxacin, and trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole) (9). Figure 1 shows the average MIC (from at least three experiments) against selected antibiotics chosen to represent different antibiotic classes. Statistical analysis was performed using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with Tukey's posttest. Deletion of acrAB increased susceptibility to all the antibiotics by 50 to 92%. tolC deletion increased susceptibility to the aminoglycosides by 52 to 66%, but not to the other drugs (9 to 23% increase in susceptibility), compared to the levels for the acrAB strain ( Fig. 1; Table 1). Resistance was restored when strains were complemented with ectopically expressed acrAB or tolC (Table 1). The reason for the variation in the MICs for chloramphenicol between the two tolC strains is uncertain, but as it is only a 2-fold diff...