Our collaboration work with Dr. Thomas Kehl-Fie and graduate student in his lab Caroline Vermilya is now on bioRxiv. In this work entitled “Multiple clades of regulators contribute to bacterial phosphate homeostasis and pathogenesis”, we explore how pathogenic bacteria regulate their phosphate metabolism.

From the paper’s importance statement:

Phosphate is both essential for life and toxic, necessitating the tight regulation of its acquisition. While previously thought to rely on a single accessory regulator, this work reveals that most bacteria possess mutiple distinct families of accessory regulators and that each family regulates homeostasis in conjunction with a unique importer family. Experiments utilizing Staphylococcus aureus revealed that all three accessory proteins can regulate phosphate homeostasis, but that an environment dependent hierarchy exists. Multiple accessory regulators are independently necessary for S. aureus to cause infection. Thus, microbes possess not one, but multiple distinct groups of accessory regulatory proteins and this diversity enables them to control phosphate homeostasis across environments, including those encountered during infection.