Secreted antigen A peptidoglycan hydrolase is essential for Enterococcus faecium cell separation and priming of immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy.

Enterococcus faecium is a microbiota species in humans that can modulate host immunity (Griffin and Hang, 2022), but has also acquired antibiotic resistance and is a major cause of hospital-associated infections (Van Tyne and Gilmore, 2014). Notably, diverse strains of E. faecium produce SagA, a highly conserved peptidoglycan hydrolase that is sufficient to promote intestinal immunity (Rangan et al., 2016; Pedicord et al., 2016; Kim et al., 2019) and immune checkpoint inhibitor antitumor activity (Griffin et al., 2021). However, the functions of SagA in E. faecium were unknown. Here, we report that deletion of sagA impaired E. faecium growth and resulted in bulged and clustered enterococci due to defective peptidoglycan cleavage and cell separation. Moreover, Δ sagA showed increased antibiotic sensitivity, yielded lower levels of active muropeptides, displayed reduced activation of the peptidoglycan pattern-recognition receptor NOD2, and failed to promote cancer immunotherapy. Importantly, the plasmid-based expression of SagA, but not its catalytically inactive mutant, restored Δ sagA growth, production of active muropeptides, and NOD2 activation. SagA is, therefore, essential for E. faecium growth, stress resistance, and activation of host immunity.

Competing Interests: SK, KF, XZ, PC, AM, TB, DG, DP No competing interests declared, HH has filed patent applications (PCT/US2016/028836, PCT/US2020/019038) for the commercial use of SagA-bacteria to improve intestinal immunity and checkpoint blockade immunotherapy, which has been licensed by Rise Therapeutics for probiotic development

(© 2024, Klupt, Fam, Zhang et al.)