Previous studies (Oliver et al., 2000; Ciofu et al., 2005; Ferroni et al., 2009) showed that hypermutability is associated especially with multi-drug resistance development. Accordingly, we found that the increase in the
frequency of mutation of PAOMY-Mgm correlated with the development of resistant subpopulations to several antipseudomonal drugs. The size of ciprofloxacin resistant subpopulation of the double GO mutant was larger compared with the single GO mutants demonstrating a faster accumulation of mutations responsible for antibiotic resistance. As previously found in single GO mutants (Mandsberg et al., 2009; Morero & Argarana, 2009), the resistance Daporinad order to ciprofloxacin of the PAOMY-Mgm Selleckchem MAPK Inhibitor Library occurred through hyperexpression of the MexCD-OprJ due to mutation in the transcriptional regulator nfxB. The types of mutations in nfxB of PAOMY-Mgm resistant mutants were G∙CT∙A transversions, which are specific for unrepaired oxidized guanines. High level of ciprofloxacin resistance has been linked to mutations in the DNA-gyrase and topoisomerase genes gyrA, parC, gyrB and parE (Oh et al., 2003; Lee et al., 2005). In accordance, an isolate with high-level resistant phenotype (> 256 mg L−1)
showed mutations in both gyrB and nfxB. The global transcription study of PAOMY-Mgm showed up-regulation of pfpI gene, which has been shown to provide protection to oxidative stress (Rodriguez-Rojas & Blazquez, 2009) and down-regulation of genes involved in iron trafficking and metabolism compared with PAO1. Repression of genes involved in iron metabolism have been reported in oxidative stress situation such as exposure to H2O2 (Chang et al., 2005) and can be explained as a protection mechanism used by the bacteria against Fenton-reaction, which requires iron and results in ROS
production. Thus, the unrepaired DNA oxidative lesions that occur in PAOMY-Mgm during growth in LB seem to trigger an oxidative stress response. It has been reported in unicellular eukaryotes such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae that various types of DNA damage are capable of causing an increase in intracellular ROS, which Teicoplanin will function as secondary signal for a generalized stress response (Rowe et al., 2008). Such a DNA damage-induced increase in intracellular ROS levels as a generalized stress response might function in prokaryotes as well, especially as ROS has been shown to act as a secondary signal for antibiotic stress in bacteria (Kohanski et al., 2010). Ciprofloxacin is one of the antibiotics that can stimulate the bacterial production of ROS (Morero & Argarana, 2009; Kohanski et al., 2010), and therefore we were interested in investigating the survival of PAOMY-Mgm mutator in competition with the wild-type PAO1 in the presence of this antibiotic.