A Bioluminescent Reporter for Antibacterial Defence Induction in Coprinopsis cinerea

The coprophilous agaricomycete Coprinopsis cinerea is a model organism for antagonistic fungal-bacterial interactions. Previous studies showed that C. cinerea responds to antagonistic bacteria with strong induction of a set of genes encoding secreted antibacterial molecules. However, little is known about the elicitors of this response. Key open questions in this respect include whether individual antibacterial defence genes are induced by different bacteria and/or by specific bacterial soluble molecules. Here, we present a new C. cinerea reporter system to monitor antibacterial defence induction and address related outstanding issues with minimal hands-on time. In this system, the promoter of the endogenous bacterial-induced gene cclys1 drives the expression of cnluc, which encodes a secreted variant of the deep-sea shrimp luciferase Nluc. We show that cNluc allows to detect and quantify cclys1 induction by measuring luminescence directly in the culture medium of reporter strain colonies. Building on these features, we successfully leveraged the inducible cNluc reporter strain for the development of a novel 96-well plate assay that allows the high-throughput screening of antibacterial defence elicitors. As cNluc can be subject to degradation by secreted proteases of fungal or bacterial origin in the culture medium, we coupled this assay to confirmatory qRT-PCR. Testing this set-up by confronting the reporter strain with several different bacteria revealed that cclys1 induction occurs independently of the bacterial ecological niche. Based on these results, we also recommend qRT-PCR exclusively for validation of negative results. We conclude that cNluc offers significant advantages over cytoplasmic reporter proteins, especially for preliminary rapid screening of multiple conditions.