Genetic analysis demonstrates that NupR directly represses the virulence regulator PlcR in Bacillus thuringiensis, indicating a direct link between bacterial nutrient metabolism and virulence.
NupR is a nucleoside permease regulator belonging to the GntR family, mainly regulating nucleoside transport in Bacillus thuringiensis. A conserved binding site for NupR was found in the promoter region of plcR. This study aimed to investigate the regulation of the virulence regulator PlcR by NupR and its impact on Bt virulence. We demonstrated that NupR can directly repress the expression of plcR. The expression of plcR can be induced by glucose and nucleosides. Glucose impacts the expression of plcR mainly through Spo0A, while the induction effect of nucleosides may be due to the production of ribose through nucleoside catabolism. In addition, NupR regulates the expression of the PlcR regulon, including hemolysin, phospholipase C, papR, and oligopeptide permease, which could result in the culture supernatant of BMB171 being less virulent to sf9 cells compared to the nupR knockout strain. The results combine the nutritional status of cells with virulence to form a regulatory loop, providing new ideas and research foundations for the study of bacterial virulence.
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Qin et al. (2025) studied this question.
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