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Reply to: Do not discard Staphylococcus aureus WTA as a vaccine antigen

Nature volume 572, pages E3–E4 (2019)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 31 July 2019

replying to R. van Dalen et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1416-8 (2019)

Recently, we described1 that the shift of an N-acetylglucosamine (GlcNAc) group from the C4 to the C3 atom of the ribitol-phosphate (RboP)-repeating unit of the wall teichoic acid (WTA) of Staphylococcus aureus strongly reduced the capacity of mice to mount a protective IgG response. This finding was consistent with the low levels of IgG directed against the altered WTA that were found in human sera1. The unusual glycosylation pattern of WTA was introduced by the enzyme TarP, which is expressed by prophages that are found in many major methicillin-resistant S. aureus lineages and we found that this unusual glycosylation pattern of WTA increases the capacity of this pathogen to evade recognition by the adaptive immune system. In the accompanying Comment2, van Dalen et al. provide new experimental data, highlight a recent patent application that uses TarP-modified, protein-conjugated WTA as a vaccine antigen against S. aureus3 and conclude that TarP-modified WTA (TarP–WTA), conjugated to a suitable carrier protein, should remain on the list of promising vaccine candidates.

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Fig. 1: Structure of S. aureus WTA and its variation by different GlcNAc transferases.

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Acknowledgements

Our work was financed by grants from the German Research Foundation to A.P. (TRR34, CRC766, TRR156 and RTG1708) and T.S. (TRR34, CRC766) and the German Center for Infection Research and is supported by infrastructure provided by the Cluster of Excellence (EXC 2124).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Interfaculty Institute of Microbiology and Infection Medicine, Infection Biology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    David Gerlach & Andreas Peschel

  2. German Centre for Infection Research, partner site Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    David Gerlach & Andreas Peschel

  3. Interfaculty Institute of Biochemistry, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Yinglan Guo & Thilo Stehle

Authors
  1. David Gerlach
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  2. Yinglan Guo
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D.G, Y.G., T.S. and A.P analysed data and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Andreas Peschel.

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Gerlach, D., Guo, Y., Stehle, T. et al. Reply to: Do not discard Staphylococcus aureus WTA as a vaccine antigen. Nature 572, E3–E4 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1417-7

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