The Two-Component Sensor Protein CovS Affects Penicilling Susceptibility by Modulation of Cell-Wall Synthesis in Streptococcus pyogenes

In Streptococcus pyogenes, we have described the two-component signal transduction sensor and regulatory systems, CovR/S affect the antimicrobial susceptibility including penicillin G before. But the mechanism how two-component sensor protein CovS modulates penicillin G susceptibility has not been elucidated till date. This study aimed to determine how the CovS affected penicillin G susceptibility in Streptococcus pyogenes by northern blot analysis. At first, we investigated the covS mRNA expression under penicillin G induction. We found that the decrease of covS mRNA expression under Penicillin G stimulation. Next we investigated the expression of cell wall synthesis gene, pbp2a and glmM with use of covS knockout mutants from emm1 Streptococcus pyogenes strain 1529. We found that the cell-wall synthesis gene expression of the ∆covS mutant strain were lower than that of the wild-type strain. Furthermore the expression of glmM mRNA gene was lower than the expression of pbp2a mRNA gene in the ∆covS mutant strain. The covS-complemented strain almost restored the mRNA expression compared to ∆covS mutant strain. The two-component sensor protein CovS affects the susceptibility to penicillin G in Streptococcus pyogenes by modulation of cell-wall synthesis.