Pervasive translation in Mycobacterium tuberculosis

  1. Carol Smith
  2. Jill G Canestrari
  3. Archer J Wang
  4. Matthew M Champion
  5. Keith M Derbyshire  Is a corresponding author
  6. Todd A Gray  Is a corresponding author
  7. Joseph T Wade  Is a corresponding author
  1. New York State Department of Health, United States
  2. University of Notre Dame, United States

Abstract

Most bacterial ORFs are identified by automated prediction algorithms. However, these algorithms often fail to identify ORFs lacking canonical features such as a length of >50 codons or the presence of an upstream Shine-Dalgarno sequence. Here, we use ribosome profiling approaches to identify actively translated ORFs in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Most of the ORFs we identify have not been previously described, indicating that the M. tuberculosis transcriptome is pervasively translated. The newly described ORFs are predominantly short, with many encoding proteins of ≤50 amino acids. Codon usage of the newly discovered ORFs suggests that most have not been subject to purifying selection, and hence are unlikely to contribute to cell fitness. Nevertheless, we identify 90 new ORFs (median length of 52 codons) that bear the hallmarks of purifying selection. Thus, our data suggest that pervasive translation of short ORFs in Mycobacterium tuberculosis serves as a rich source for the evolution of new functional proteins.

Data availability

Raw Illumina sequencing data are available from the ArrayExpress and European Nucleotide Archive repositories with accession numbers E-MTAB-8039 and E-MTAB-10695. Raw mass spectrometry data are available through MassIVE, with exchange #MSV000087541. Reviewers can access the raw mass spectrometry data at ftp://MSV000087541@massive.ucsd.edu, password: sproteinTBPython code is available at https://github.com/wade-lab/Mtb_Ribo-RET.

The following data sets were generated

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Carol Smith

    Wadsworth Center, Division of Genetics, New York State Department of Health, Albany, United States
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  2. Jill G Canestrari

    Wadsworth Center, Division of Genetics, New York State Department of Health, Albany, United States
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  3. Archer J Wang

    Wadsworth Center, Division of Genetics, New York State Department of Health, Albany, United States
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  4. Matthew M Champion

    Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, United States
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  5. Keith M Derbyshire

    Wadsworth Center, Division of Genetics, New York State Department of Health, Albany, United States
    For correspondence
    keith.derbyshire@health.ny.gov
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  6. Todd A Gray

    Wadsworth Center, Division of Genetics, New York State Department of Health, Albany, United States
    For correspondence
    todd.gray@health.ny.gov
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  7. Joseph T Wade

    Wadsworth Center, Division of Genetics, New York State Department of Health, Albany, United States
    For correspondence
    joseph.wade@gmail.com
    Competing interests
    Joseph T Wade, Reviewing editor, eLife.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-9779-3160

Funding

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (R21AI117158)

  • Keith M Derbyshire
  • Todd A Gray
  • Joseph T Wade

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (R21AI119427)

  • Keith M Derbyshire
  • Todd A Gray
  • Joseph T Wade

National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R01GM139277)

  • Matthew M Champion
  • Keith M Derbyshire
  • Todd A Gray
  • Joseph T Wade

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.

Metrics

  • 2,742
    views
  • 471
    downloads
  • 37
    citations

Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.

Download links

A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.

Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)

Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)

Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)

  1. Carol Smith
  2. Jill G Canestrari
  3. Archer J Wang
  4. Matthew M Champion
  5. Keith M Derbyshire
  6. Todd A Gray
  7. Joseph T Wade
(2022)
Pervasive translation in Mycobacterium tuberculosis
eLife 11:e73980.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.73980

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.73980

Further reading

    1. Immunology and Inflammation
    2. Microbiology and Infectious Disease
    Yan Zhao, Hanshuo Zhu ... Li Sun
    Research Article

    Type III secretion system (T3SS) is a virulence apparatus existing in many bacterial pathogens. Structurally, T3SS consists of the base, needle, tip, and translocon. The NLRC4 inflammasome is the major receptor for T3SS needle and basal rod proteins. Whether other T3SS components are recognized by NLRC4 is unclear. In this study, using Edwardsiella tarda as a model intracellular pathogen, we examined T3SS−inflammasome interaction and its effect on cell death. E. tarda induced pyroptosis in a manner that required the bacterial translocon and the host inflammasome proteins of NLRC4, NLRP3, ASC, and caspase 1/4. The translocon protein EseB triggered NLRC4/NAIP-mediated pyroptosis by binding NAIP via its C-terminal region, particularly the terminal 6 residues (T6R). EseB homologs exist widely in T3SS-positive bacteria and share high identities in T6R. Like E. tarda EseB, all of the representatives of the EseB homologs exhibited T6R-dependent NLRC4 activation ability. Together these results revealed the function and molecular mechanism of EseB to induce host cell pyroptosis and suggested a highly conserved inflammasome-activation mechanism of T3SS translocon in bacterial pathogens.

    1. Microbiology and Infectious Disease
    Julia A Hotinger, Ian W Campbell ... Matthew K Waldor
    Research Article

    Murine models are often used to study the pathogenicity and dissemination of the enteric pathogen Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium. Here, we quantified S. Typhimurium population dynamics in mice using the STAMPR analytic pipeline and a highly diverse S. Typhimurium barcoded library containing ~55,000 unique strains distinguishable by genomic barcodes by enumerating S. Typhimurium founding populations and deciphering routes of spread in mice. We found that a severe bottleneck allowed only one in a million cells from an oral inoculum to establish a niche in the intestine. Furthermore, we observed compartmentalization of pathogen populations throughout the intestine, with few barcodes shared between intestinal segments and feces. This severe bottleneck widened and compartmentalization was reduced after streptomycin treatment, suggesting the microbiota plays a key role in restricting the pathogen’s colonization and movement within the intestine. Additionally, there was minimal sharing between the intestine and extraintestinal organ populations, indicating dissemination to extraintestinal sites occurs rapidly, before substantial pathogen expansion in the intestine. Bypassing the intestinal bottleneck by inoculating mice via intravenous or intraperitoneal injection revealed that Salmonella re-enters the intestine after establishing niches in extraintestinal sites by at least two distinct pathways. One pathway results in a diverse intestinal population. The other re-seeding pathway is through the bile, where the pathogen is often clonal, leading to clonal intestinal populations and correlates with gallbladder pathology. Together, these findings deepen our understanding of Salmonella population dynamics.