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Mesophilic Aeromonas UDP-glucose pyrophosphorylase (GalU) mutants show two types of lipopolysaccharide structures and reduced virulence

Evgeny Vinogradov^2,

¹ Departamento de Microbiología, Facultad de Biología, Universidad de Barcelona, Diagonal 645, 08071 Barcelona, Spain
² N. D. Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow 119991, Russia

Correspondence
Juan M. Tomás
jtomas{at}ub.edu

A mutation in galU that causes the lack of O34-antigen lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in Aeromonas hydrophila strain AH-3 was identified. It was proved that A. hydrophila GalU is a UDP-glucose pyrophosphorylase responsible for synthesis of UDP-glucose from glucose 1-phosphate and UTP. The galU mutant from this strain showed two types of LPS structures, represented by two bands on LPS gels. The first one (slow-migrating band in gels) corresponds to a rough strain having the complete core, with two significant differences: it lacks the terminal galactose residue from the LPS-core and 4-amino-4-deoxyarabinose residues from phosphate groups in lipid A. The second one (fast-migrating band in gels) corresponds to a deeply truncated structure with the LPS-core restricted to one 3-deoxy-D-manno-oct-2-ulosonic acid (Kdo) and three L-glycero-D-manno-heptose residues. galU mutants in several motile mesophilic Aeromonas strains from serotypes O1, O2, O11, O18, O21 and O44 were also devoid of the O-antigen LPS. The galU mutation reduced to less than 1 % the survival of these Aeromonas strains in serum, decreased the ability of these strains to adhere and reduced by 1.5 or 2 log units the virulence of Aeromonas serotype O34 strains in a septicaemia model in either fish or mice. All the changes observed in the galU mutants were rescued by the introduction of the corresponding single wild-type gene.

Present address: Institute for Biological Sciences, National Research Council, Ottawa, ON K1A 0R6, Canada.

The GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ accession no. for the nucleotide sequence of the A. hydrophila AH-3 galU region described in this paper is EF123040.

A table of ¹H and ¹³C NMR data for oligosaccharide fractions 1 and 2 is available with the online version of this paper.