

FOLLOWUS
School of Marine Sciences, Ningbo University, Ningbo 315832, China
zhangweiwei1@nbu.edu.cn
Received:24 July 2024,
Accepted:16 October 2024,
Published:01 September 2025
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ZHANG Jinxia,MU Zhixin,ZHOU Qiling,et al.Indole enhanced the bactericidal efficacy of tetracycline against pathogen Vibrio splendidus[J].Journal of Oceanology and Limnology,2025,43(05):1623-1635.
ZHANG Jinxia,MU Zhixin,ZHOU Qiling,et al.Indole enhanced the bactericidal efficacy of tetracycline against pathogen Vibrio splendidus[J].Journal of Oceanology and Limnology,2025,43(05):1623-1635. DOI: 10.1007/s00343-025-4202-5.
Recently
more and more bacteria have been reported to become tolerant to antibiotics. In this study
one
tnaA
gene involved in indole production
and the effect of exogenous indole on the formation of persister cells specific to tetracycline in
Vibrio
splendidus
were characterized. The
tnaA
Vs
gene was first cloned and conditionally expressed in
Escherichia
coli
Rosetta (DE3). To investigate the regulatory effect of TnaA
Vs
the
tnaA
deletion strain AJ01/∆
tnaA
was constructed by in-frame deletion. The undetected extracellular indole in the AJ01/∆
tnaA
indicated that TnaA was the solo enzyme to produce indole in
V
.
splendidus
. The drop plate method showed that AJ01/∆
tnaA
was more tolerant to the higher concentration of tetracycline than that of AJ01
being 340-fold higher in the proportion of survived cells when cell density OD
600
≈0.65. Moreover
the synergistic effects of indole and tetracycline on killing of
V
.
splendidus
were determined. Results show that addition of 2-mmol/L indole increased the susceptibility of both AJ01 and AJ01/∆
tnaA
to 10×minimum inhibitory concentration tetracycline. To explore the genes and pathways regulated by TnaA
Vs
the transcriptomic analysis between AJ01 and AJ01/∆
tnaA
was performed. Result shows that TCA cycle
arginine biosynthesis
quorum sensing and microbial metabolism in diverse environments were downregulated
while the ribosome pathways
the protein metabolic process
peptide biosynthetic and metabolic process were upregulated in the AJ01/∆
tnaA
. This study shows that indole could enhance the bactericidal effect of tetracycline on
V
.
splendidus
by decreased ribosome level probably but increased ATP level.
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