aureus Mu50 compared to in S. aureus SA45 and the final extracellular SEA concentration in the S. aureus Mu50 cultures was 61% higher than in S. aureus SA45 cultures on average. Figure 5 Growth, SEA levels, and sea mRNA levels of S. aureus SA45 grown at two pH levels. (A) Growth curves determined INK1197 in vivo by OD measurements at 620 nm and extracellular SEA levels at pH 7.0 and pH 5.5. (B) Relative expression

(RE) of sea at pH 7.0 and pH 5.5. Solid, dotted and dashed lines represents growth, SEA levels and RE, respectively. Values are the mean and standard deviations of two independent batch cultures. Genetic diversity of sea Nucleotide sequence analysis of sea and prophage regions immediately upstream and downstream of the gene was performed on the whole-genome sequenced S. aureus

strains MRSA252 [22], MSSA476 [22], Mu3, Mu50 [21], MW2 [23], and Newman [24] to determine genetic differences that may explain the different sea expression and SEA production profiles observed at pH 5.5 with S. aureus Mu50 and SA45. Sequence alignment of the coding region of sea revealed two main groups of sea-carrying phages. Enzalutamide Within a group the sea sequences showed 100% sequence similarity and between the two groups the sequence similarity was 98%. Prophages ΦMu3, ΦMu50A, ΦSa3ms, and ΦSa3mw clustered together in a sea-group designated sea 1, while Φ252B and ΦNM3 formed a sea group, designated sea 2. All six phages shared a homologous region of 3.2 kb downstream of the sea gene containing the sak gene. Thereafter, the nucleotide sequences diverged, forming three subgroups of sea phages. The same grouping of phages was observed immediately upstream of the translational start site of sea (Figure 6). An analogous phage grouping was recently reported when comparing the integrase (int) nucleotide sequences of these bacteriophages [25]. To improve the resolution of phylogenetic analysis of these bacteriophages based on int genes, we repeated the int gene grouping (data not shown). The ΦMu3A/ΦMu50A branch was found to be closer to the Φ252B/ΦNM3 branch than to the ΦSa3ms/ΦSa3mw branch. This is in direct

contrast to what was found for the sea gene. Figure 6 Gene map of the sea virulence region of S. aureus. Gene map of the sea gene and regions immediately upstream and downstream Ribonuclease T1 of the gene in six different S. aureus strains. The map is based on nucleotide sequence analysis of the strains. Solid lines are sequences within the sea-carrying prophage. Dotted lines represent sequences outside the prophage region. The letters a-h indicates were PCR amplicons are located within the region; numbers 1-2 indicate transcription start sites [14]. In order to identify the phage- and sea-group of SA45, eight different regions were targeted by PCR (see Table 1 and Figure 6). This analysis showed that SA45 carries the sea 1-version of the sea gene and belongs to the same selleck compound subgroup as ΦSa3mw.