Joseph Lyman

Evolutionary Trade-Offs Underlie the Multi-faceted Virulence of Staphylococcus

aureus

Introduction
Humans have been at war with microbial pathogens since we first existed on this
earth. Since science has advanced, much effort has been dedicated towards controlling
and/or killing microbial pathogens that are especially dangerous to our health. Our
ability to find strategies for controlling these pathogens is effected by our understanding
of them. The objective here is to find the correlation between the toxicity of
Staphylococcus aureus and its disease severity.
S. aureus is a major microbial pathogen and has become a major topic of
discussion among microbiologists and all scientists. The reason for S. aureus being so
dangerous is that it an opportunistic pathogen, meaning that it lives on its host without
causing any symptoms, and may occasionally cause disease. Our studies here will help
us establish a better understanding of the role of toxicity in causing invasive disease.

Materials and Methods

To perform this experiment they obtained blood samples from a specific
population. They are able to isolate the toxin containing part of the blood via
centrifugation. The toxin-containing portion of the blood is called the supernatant. In
order to test for cell death to see if these cells could survive the experiment, they
incubated the supernatant at normal body temperature (37 C) for 12 minutes. The white

blood cell portions of each blood sample was then incubated with a solution containing
10% of the bacteria supernatant for 15 minutes to observe whether the white blood cells
or the toxin-containing cells survived. Observations were made regarding the death of
the white blood cells in relation to the quantity of toxin the supernatant contained. For
these methods to work, a Cytometric machine and a centrifuge were used. Centrifuges
were the predominantly used method for separating cells to be tested.

Results
Interestingly enough, the results from the many experiments documented in this
article showed an inverse correlation between toxicity and the severity of disease that it
causes. As they took samples from patients from their nasal cavities, they found that as
the amount of toxins contained in the sample decreased, the severity of disease would
increase in the patients. For instance, after 12 months of observing patients, they took a
nasal sample, which showed significantly reduced toxins, but the patient developed
bacteremia shortly thereafter. One of the significant findings from this is that it showed
that S. aureus had a difficult time switching between its ability to release toxins and
attach itself to humans. The other significant finding from the study was that there was a
positive correlation between the amount of toxins released by the bacteria, and the white
blood cells ability to locate the bacteria. Therefore, the more toxins released, the easier
it was for the body to fight off the bacteria, and the less toxins release, the more severe
the disease was that the bacteria caused.

Discussion
The initial goal of the experiment was to determine the effect that toxicity has on
causing severe disease, with relation to the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus. It is a very
complicated feat, as there are many variables that contribute to S. aureus virulence. In
essence For microbial pathogens, many factors contribute to their success, but for an
opportunistic pathogen that can either reside asymptomatically or cause symptomatic
infections ranging from superficial to life-threatening invasive disease. (Maisem Laabei,
paragraph 22) They did find that toxicity has an inverse relationship to the severity of
disease it causes. They also determined that there are many other factors involved in how
severe of a disease that S. aureus causes, which may needed to be determined later on in
other studies and experiments. Their conclusions were limited in that they only found a
correlation between toxicity and virulence of the bacteria, but they were not able to
determine what causes a bacteria to be more toxic. They did also find that toxicity had a
positive effect on the white blood cells ability to locate the bacteria, but they do not
know all of the reasons that the bacteria would release more toxins. The sample size was
the biggest limitation of this study, and may be able to be overcome by doing additional
studies involving a larger more diverse sample size.

Works Cited
Laabei, Maisem, Anne-Catrin Uhlemann, and Franklin D. Lowy. "Evolutionary TradeOffs Underlie the Multi-faceted Virulence of Staphylococcus Aureus." PLOS Biology:
Evolutionary Trade-Offs Underlie the Multi-faceted Virulence of Staphylococcus Aureus.
2 Sept. 2015. Web. 11 Nov. 2015.