Poster Presentation Australian Society for Microbiology Annual Scientific Meeting 2019

A Small RNA Transforms the Multidrug Resistance of Pseudomonas aeruginosa to Drug Susceptibility. (#147)

Oi kwan Carmen Law 1 2 , Qing Pan 2 , Joseph Lee 2 , Ting-Fung Chan 1 , Wai Sing Norman Lo 3 , Ling Irene Ang 3 , Chun Alex Koon 1 , Margaret Ip 3 , Ho Yin Edwin Chan 1 , Chi Kong Terrence Lau 2
  1. School of Life Sciences, The Chinese University of HK, NA, Hong Kong SAR
  2. Department of Biomedical Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, NA, Hong Kong SAR
  3. Department of Microbiology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, NA, Hong Kong SAR

Bacteria with multiple drug resistance (MDR) have become a global issue worldwide, and hundreds of thousands of people’s lives are threatened every year. The emergence of novel MDR strains and insufficient development of new antimicrobial agents are the major reasons that limit the choice of antibiotics for the treatment of bacterial infection. Thus, preserving the clinical value of current antibiotics could be one of the effective approaches to resolve this problem. Here we identified numerous novel small RNAs that were downregulated in the MDR clinical isolates of Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeru), and we demonstrated that overexpression of one of these small RNAs (sRNAs), AS1974, was able to transform the MDR clinical strain to drug hypersusceptibility. AS1974 is the master regulator to moderate the expression of several drug resistance pathways, including membrane transporters and biofilm-associated antibiotic-resistant genes, and its expression is regulated by the methylation sites located at the 50 UTR of the gene. Our findings unravel the sRNA that regulates the MDR pathways in clinical isolates of P. aeru. Moreover, transforming bacterial drug resistance to hypersusceptibility using sRNA could be the potential approach for tackling MDR bacteria in the future.