The correlation between the presence of quorum sensing, toxin-antitoxin system genes and MIC values with ability of biofilm formation in clinical isolates of Pseudomonas aeruginosa

INTRODUCTION: Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a Gram-negative bacterium that considered as important opportunistic human pathogen. One of the mechanisms that help bacteria to tolerate survival in adverse conditions and resistance to antibiotics is biofilm formation through quorum sensing (QS) signals and toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems. QS and TA are two systems that have important roles in biofilm formation. QS is a global regulatory mechanism that enable bacteria to communicate with each other by production of auto inducers (AI) molecules in population. Because of importance biofilm formation in P. aeruginosa infections, here, we studied frequency of QS and TA genes among clinical isolates of P. aeruginosa with ability of biofilm formation. MATERIALS AND METHODS: One hundred and forty clinical isolates of P. aeruginosa were collected from Tehran and Ilam hospitals. The isolates were identified by biochemical tests. Biofilm formation was evaluated by microplate method. After DNA extraction by boiling method, the frequency of QS genes (lasIR, rhlIR), and TA genes (mazEF, relBE, hipBA, ccdAB and mqsR) were analyzed by PCR. RESULTS: Our results showed that maximum resistance is related to aztreonam (72.85%) antibiotic. Most of isolates were able to produce biofilm (87.15%) and the majority of them formed strong biofilm (56.42%). PCR results showed that frequency of mazEF, relBE, hipBA, ccdAB, mqsR, lasIR and rhlIR genes were 85.71, 100, 1.42, 100, 57.14, 93.57 and 83.57 percent, respectively. CONCLUSION: Clinical isolates of P. aeruginosa had high ability to form biofilm, and QS and TA system genes among these isolates were very high (except hipBA genes). There are significaut correlation between biofilm for mation and present of QS and TA system genes.