TY - JOUR
T1 - Differences in SpeB protease activity among group a streptococci associated with superficial, invasive, and autoimmune disease
AU - Ly, Anhphan T.
AU - Noto, John P.
AU - Walwyn, Odaelys L.
AU - Tanz, Robert R.
AU - Shulman, Stanford T.
AU - Kabat, William
AU - Bessen, Debra E.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by NIH AI065572 and AI117088 (www.nih.gov) to D.E.B. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Ly et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2017/5
Y1 - 2017/5
N2 - The secreted cysteine proteinase SpeB is an important virulence factor of group A streptococci (GAS), whereby SpeB activity varies widely among strains. To establish the degree to which SpeB activity correlates with disease, GAS organisms were recovered from patients with pharyngitis, impetigo, invasive disease or acute rheumatic fever (ARF), and selected for analysis using rigorous sampling criteria; >300 GAS isolates were tested for SpeB activity by casein digestion assays, and each GAS isolate was scored as a SpeB-producer or non-producer. Highly significant statistical differences (p < 0.01) in SpeB production are observed between GAS recovered from patients with ARF (41.5% SpeB-non-producers) compared to pharyngitis (20.5%), invasive disease (16.7%), and impetigo (5.5%). SpeB activity differences between pharyngitis and impetigo isolates are also significant, whereas pharyngitis versus invasive isolates show no significant difference. The disproportionately greater number of SpeB-non-producers among ARF-associated isolates may indicate an altered transcriptional program for many rheumatogenic strains and/or a protective role for SpeB in GAS-triggered autoimmunity.
AB - The secreted cysteine proteinase SpeB is an important virulence factor of group A streptococci (GAS), whereby SpeB activity varies widely among strains. To establish the degree to which SpeB activity correlates with disease, GAS organisms were recovered from patients with pharyngitis, impetigo, invasive disease or acute rheumatic fever (ARF), and selected for analysis using rigorous sampling criteria; >300 GAS isolates were tested for SpeB activity by casein digestion assays, and each GAS isolate was scored as a SpeB-producer or non-producer. Highly significant statistical differences (p < 0.01) in SpeB production are observed between GAS recovered from patients with ARF (41.5% SpeB-non-producers) compared to pharyngitis (20.5%), invasive disease (16.7%), and impetigo (5.5%). SpeB activity differences between pharyngitis and impetigo isolates are also significant, whereas pharyngitis versus invasive isolates show no significant difference. The disproportionately greater number of SpeB-non-producers among ARF-associated isolates may indicate an altered transcriptional program for many rheumatogenic strains and/or a protective role for SpeB in GAS-triggered autoimmunity.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0177784
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0177784
M3 - Article
C2 - 28545045
AN - SCOPUS:85019875531
VL - 12
JO - PLoS One
JF - PLoS One
SN - 1932-6203
IS - 5
M1 - e0177784
ER -