Aimee Wilde
University of North Carolina
James Cassat lab
Staphylococcus aureus is particularly adept at colonizing the bone to cause osteomyelitis. In order for the bacterium to thrive in this infection environment, a diverse array of genetic programs must be in place to accommodate this lifestyle. Using the unbiased, genome wide approach TnSeq, we identified the two-component system SrrAB as a bacterial factor essential for inducing invasive osteomyelitis. SrrAB is known to regulate the aerobic/anaerobic shift, mediate resistance to oxidative stress, and modulate toxin production. My thesis project is to determine the regulatory role of SrrA under aerobic and hypoxic conditions and identify the exact metabolic pathways that SrrA controls during osteomyelitis.