CRISPR-Cas9-mediated genome editing in vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium

• Published in: FEMS microbiology letters Vol. 366; no. 22; pp. 1 - 7
• Main Authors: de Maat, Vincent, Stege, Paul B, Dedden, Mark, Hamer, Maud, van Pijkeren, Jan-Peter, Willems, Rob J L, van Schaik, Willem
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Oxford University Press 01-11-2019
• Subjects: Antibiotic resistance; Antibiotics; Bacteria; Chromosomes; CRISPR; Deletion mutant; DNA sequencing; Drug resistance; Editing; Enterococcus; Enterococcus faecium; Fluorescence; Gene deletion; Genetic aspects; Genome editing; Genomes; Gram-positive bacteria; Methods; Microbiology; Multidrug resistance; Mutants; Nucleotide sequencing; Recombination; Research Letter; Vancomycin; United Kingdom; molecular biology; genome editing; counterselection; CRISPR-Cas9; mutants; Enterococcus faecium
• ISSN: 1574-6968; 0378-1097; 1574-6968
• DOI: 10.1093/femsle/fnz256

ABSTRACT
The Gram-positive bacterium Enterococcus faecium is becoming increasingly prevalent as a cause of hospital-acquired, antibiotic-resistant infections. A fundamental part of research into E. faecium biology relies on the ability to generate targeted mutants but this process is currently labour-intensive and time-consuming, taking 4 to 5 weeks per mutant. In this report, we describe a method relying on the high recombination rates of E. faecium and the application of the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat (CRISPR)-Cas9 genome editing tool to more efficiently generate targeted mutants in the E. faecium chromosome. Using this tool and the multi-drug resistant clinical E. faecium strain E745, we generated a deletion mutant in the lacL gene, which encodes the large subunit of the E. faeciumβ-galactosidase. Blue/white screening using 5-bromo-4-chloro-3-indolyl-β-D-galactopyranoside (X-gal) could be used to distinguish between the wild-type and lacL deletion mutant. We also inserted two copies of gfp into the intrinsic E. faecium macrolide resistance gene msrC to generate stable green fluorescent cells. We conclude that CRISPR-Cas9 can be used to generate targeted genome modifications in E. faecium in 3 weeks, with limited hands-on time. This method can potentially be implemented in other Gram-positive bacteria with high intrinsic recombination rates.
An approach based on CRISPR-Cas9 was developed to efficiently generate targeted mutations in the multi-drug resistant opportunistic pathogen Enterococcus faecium.