Generalized Bacteriophage Transduction in Serratia marcescens

Abstract

© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York.Serratia marcescens is a Gram-negative bacterium from the Enterobacteriaceae family. As an opportunistic human pathogen and a causative agent of a range of nosocomial infections, S. marcescens represents a growing public health problem. Little is known about S. marcescens pathogenicity factors, in part due to the lack of well-developed functional genomic tools. Bacteriophage transduction is one of the main mechanisms of horizontal transfer of DNA in bacteria. S. marcescens bacteriophages previously used in transduction experiments are strain-specific, and no comprehensive studies have previously been done to evaluate the efficiency of transduction across different phages and host strains. In this study, we directly compared the ability of bacteriophages ΦOT8 and ΦIF3 to infect two S. marcescens strains, SM6 and SR41-8000. We successfully used bacteriophage ΦOT8 to transfer a mutation in tolC locus between two S. marcescens strains.