Pseudomonas aeruginosa-induced mitochondrial dysfunction inhibits proinflammatory cytokine secretion and enhances cytotoxicity in mouse macrophages in a reactive oxygen species (ROS)-dependent way.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa belongs to the genus Pseudomonas and is a common Gram-negative, exclusively aerobic, conditionally pathogenic bacterium with the characteristics of easy colonization, mutation, and multidrug resistance (Deng et al., 2015; Azam and Khan, 2019; Jurado-Martín et al., 2021). It is mainly distributed in the air, soil, water, intestinal tract, and skin surface of humans and domestic animals and can cause complications such as ulcerative keratitis, otitis externa, skin and soft tissue infections, respiratory infections, sepsis, osteomyelitis, endocarditis, and urinary tract infections in burned or immunocompromised patients (Azam and Khan, 2019; Chai and Xu, 2020; Voth et al., 2020). P. aeruginosa is a naturally drug-resistant bacterium that is resistant to a wide range of antibiotics, making it one of the major opportunistic pathogens leading to in-hospital infections (Pang et al., 2019; Chai and Xu, 2020; Reynolds and Kollef, 2021). According to the surveillance report of the China Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System (CARSS, http://www.carss.cn), Gram-negative bacteria accounted for more than 70% of all bacterial infections, and P. aeruginosa accounted for 12.4%, 12.0%, and 12.2% in 2018, 2019, and 2020, respectively. Therefore, P. aeruginosa infection has become an important concern in public health care, and it is particularly important to gain insight into the means of host immune defense against P. aeruginosa infection.