PNNL

Abstract

Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium (aka, S. typhimurium) is a facultative intracellular pathogen that causes ~40,000 reported cases of acute gastroenteritis and diarrhea a year in the United States. To develop a deeper understanding of the infectious state of S. typhimurium, liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry-based “bottom-up” proteomics was used to globally analyze the proteins present under specific growth conditions. Salmonella typhimurium LT2 strain cells were grown in contrasting culture conditions that mimicked both natural free-living conditions and an infectious state, i.e., logarithm phase, stationary phase and Mg-depleted medium growth. Initial comparisons of the LT2 strain protein abundances among cell culture conditions indicate that the majority of proteins do not change significantly. Not unexpectedly, cells grown in Mg-depleted medium conditions had a higher abundance of Mg2+ transport proteins than found in other growth conditions. A second more virulent Salmonella typhimurium strain (14028) was also studied with these growth conditions and used to directly compare to the LT2 strain. The strain comparison offers a unique opportunity to compare and contrast observations in these closely related bacteria. One particular protein family, propanediol utilization proteins, was drastically more abundant in the 14028 strain than in the LT2 strain, and may be a contributor to increased pathogenicity in the 14028 strain.