PLoS ONE (Jan 2013)

(1)H NMR-based metabolite profiling of planktonic and biofilm cells in Acinetobacter baumannii 1656-2.

  • Jinki Yeom,
  • Ji-Hyun Shin,
  • Ji-Young Yang,
  • Jungmin Kim,
  • Geum-Sook Hwang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0057730
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8, no. 3
p. e57730

Abstract

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Acinetobacter baumannii is an aerobic and gram-negative pathogenic bacterium that is resistant to most antibiotics. Recently, A. baumannii 1656-2 exhibited the ability to form biofilms under clinical conditions. In this study, global metabolite profiling of both planktonic and biofilm forms of A. baumannii 1656-2 was performed using high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and multivariate statistical analysis to investigate the metabolic patterns leading to biofilm formation. Principal components analysis (PCA) and orthogonal partial least-squares discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) score plots showed a distinct separation between planktonic and biofilm cells. Metabolites including acetates, pyruvate, succinate, UDP-glucose, AMP, glutamate, and lysine were increasingly involved in the energy metabolism of biofilm formation. In particular, the ratio of N-acetyl-D-glucosamine (GlcNAc) to D-glucosamine (GlcNH2) was significantly higher during biofilm formation than under the planktonic condition. This study demonstrates that NMR-based global metabolite profiling of bacterial cells can provide valuable insight into the metabolic changes in multidrug resistant and biofilm-forming bacteria such as A. baumannii 1656-2.