The involvement of McpB chemoreceptor from Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 in virulence García Fontana, Cristina Vílchez, Juan I. González-Requena, Marta González López, Jesús Juan Krell, Tino Matilla, Miguel Manzanera Ruiz, Maximino Enrique Work in Dr. Manzanera’s laboratory was funded by the Spanish Ministry for Economy and Competitiveness, within the context of the research projects CTM2017-84332-R, and CGL2017-91737-EXP. Dr. Krell’s laboratory was supported by FEDER funds and Fondo Social Europeo through grants from the Junta de Andalucía (grant CVI-7335) and the Spanish Ministry for Economy and Competitiveness (grants BIO2013-42297 and BIO2016-76779-P). We thank Prof. Caroline Harwood (University of Washington) for providing a P. aeruginosa PAO1 wt strain and the mcpB mutant, that were used for initial experiments not reported here. Supplementary information accompanies this paper at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-49697-7. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic human pathogen causing infections in a variety of plant and animal hosts. The gene mcpB, part of the chemosensory gene cluster II, encodes a soluble chemoreceptor whose function remains unknown. Previous studies show that the cheB2 gene, also located in the chemosensory cluster II, is involved in a specific response during infection and it is required for full pathogenicity of P. aeruginosa. To determine whether the McpB (or Aer2) chemoreceptor is involved in virulence processes, we generated a mcpB mutant and tested its phenotype using a virulence-measuring system. This system was developed by our group and is based on different bioassays using organisms living at different soil trophic levels, including microbial, nematode, arthropod, annelid, and plant model systems. The deletion of mcpB resulted in an attenuation of bacterial virulence in different infection models, and wild-type virulence was restored following genetic complementation of the mutant strain. Our study indicates that the McpB chemoreceptor is linked to virulence processes and may constitute the basis for the development of alternative strategies against this pathogen. 2020-04-21T13:08:30Z 2020-04-21T13:08:30Z 2019-09-11 info:eu-repo/semantics/article García-Fontana, C., Vílchez, J.I., González-Requena, M. et al. The involvement of McpB chemoreceptor from Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 in virulence. Sci Rep 9, 13166 (2019). [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-49697-7] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/61438 10.1038/s41598-019-49697-7 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 3.0 España Nature Research