Influential Quorum Sensing Proteins of multidrug resistant Proteus mirabilis causing urinary tract infections

Abstract

Catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI) has become an alarming hospital based disease with the increase of multidrug resistance (MDR) strains of Proteus mirabilis. High prevalence of long-term hospital based CAUTI for patients along with moderate percentage of morbidity due to ignorance, failure and MDR, necessitates an immediate intervention strategy to combat the deadly disease. Several reports and reviews focus on revealing the important genes and proteins essential to tackle CAUTI caused by P. mirabilis. Despite longitudinal studies and methodical strategies to circumvent the issues, effective means of unearthing the most influential proteins to target for therapeutic uses have been meagre. Here we have reported a strategic approach for identifying the most influential proteins from the complete set of proteins of the whole genome of P. mirabilis, besides comparing the interactomes comprising the autoinducer-2 (AI-2) biosynthetic pathway along with other proteins involved in biofilm formation and responsible for virulence. Essentially, we have adopted a computational network model based approach to construct a set of small protein interaction networks (SPIN) along with the whole genome (GPIN) to identify, albeit theoretically, the most significant proteins. These might actually be responsible for the phenomenon of quorum sensing (QS) and biofilm formation and thus, could be therapeutically targeted to fight out the 188 MDR threats to antibiotics of P. mirabilis. Our approach signifies the eigenvector centrality coupled with k-core analyses to be a better measure in addressing the pressing issues