Common Ground in Chaos: Diversified Photodynamic Treatments Converge on a Unified Stress Architecture in Escherichia coli

The rise of antimicrobial resistance has intensified interest in antimicrobial photodynamic inactivation (aPDI) and antimicrobial blue light (aBL) as alternatives or adjuvants to conventional antibiotics. However, whether chemically distinct photodynamic treatments elicit a shared bacterial response remains unclear. Here, we integrated transcriptomic profiles of Escherichia coli BW25113 exposed to five short-term, sub-lethal photodynamic treatments: antimicrobial blue light (aBL), aBL combined with 5-aminolevulinic acid (aBL+ALA), rose bengal (RB), new methylene blue (NMB), and the cationic porphyrin TMPyP. Intersection analysis identified 891 conserved core genes differentially expressed across all treatments, of which approximately 98% changed in a consistent direction despite differences in photosensitizer chemistry and activating wavelength. Random-effects meta-analysis and robust rank aggregation prioritized 88 high-confidence genes, revealing induction of envelope stress and cytoplasmic protein quality control pathways alongside repression of acid resistance, hydrogen metabolism, molybdate transport, and biofilm formation. Regulon enrichment indicated that heat-shock sigma factor {sigma}32/RpoH and the envelope-stress regulators CpxR, BaeR, {sigma}24/RpoE, and PspF were enriched among induced genes, whereas GadW/GadX/GadE, Fur, and {sigma}38/RpoS were enriched among repressed genes. Functional validation using selected single-gene Keio knockouts confirmed that deletion of conserved-core genes sensitized E. coli to photodynamic treatment and delayed post-treatment recovery in a modality-dependent manner. Moreover, RT-qPCR analysis of selected transcriptional responses confirmed the direction and overall pattern of RNA-seq-derived expression changes. Together, these findings define a unified conserved early survival program in E. coli after chemically distinct photodynamic treatments and identify stress-response modules that may serve as targets for potentiating aPDI. Graphical abstract O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=126 SRC="FIGDIR/small/744726v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (46K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@dbbadaorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1c85538org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@152d699org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@18705a6_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG