Antimicrobial Weapons of Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a robust and versatile organism capable of surviving and prospering in a diverse array of environments and is an opportunistic pathogen of humans. One reason for the success of this pathogen is the large arsenal of antimicrobial weapons that it possesses. Here we focus our attention on these antimicrobial weapons and how they give P. aeruginosa a survival edge in polymicrobial environments. We define antimicrobial weapons as components produced by P. aeruginosa that are used to kill, inhibit growth and/or subvert key cellular functions in other microbes. P. aeruginosa has a large and complex genome and encodes an armament of antimicrobial weapons that fall into two subclasses; those that are delivered directly to competing microbes using a contact-dependent method, and those that are secreted in a contact-independent manner into the environment to then be available to target neighbouring cells. This chapter provides an overview of the major antimicrobial weapons possessed by P. aeruginosa, captures recent advances in the field and discusses how these could be targeted as a therapeutic intervention, or potentially harnessed to combat infection.