Benzyl isothiocyanate downregulated the expression of virulence factors in staphylococcus aureus. - GreenMedInfo Summary

() is a common foodborne pathogen that leads to various diseases; therefore, we urgently need to identify different means to control this harmful pathogen in food. In this study, we monitored the transcriptional changes ofby RNA-seq analysis to better understand the effect of benzyl isothiocyanate (BITC) on the virulence inhibition ofand determined the bacteriostatic effect of BITC at subinhibitory concentrations. Our results revealed that, compared with the control group (SAC), the BITC-treated experimental group (SAQ_BITC) had 708 differentially expressed genes (DEGs), of which 333 genes were downregulated and the capsular polysaccharide () was significantly downregulated. Furthermore, we screened five of the most virulent factors of, including the capsular polysaccharide biosynthesis protein (), capsular polysaccharide synthesis enzyme (), thermonuclease (), clumping factor (), and protein A (), and verified the accuracy of these significantly downregulated genes by qRT-PCR. At the same time, we used light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and inverted fluorescence microscopy (IFM) to observe changes in biofilm associated with theand. Therefore, these results will help to further study the basis of BITC for the antibacterial action of foodborne pathogenic bacteria.