4.1. General Bacterial Culture and Molecular Biology Reagents

All chemicals and reagents were purchased as analytical grade or higher. All molecular biology enzymes (restriction enzymes and DNA polymerase) and buffers were acquired from New England Biolabs. Oligonucleotides were purchased from Geneworks Ptd Ltd. Details of oligonucleotides used for cloning (Table S4), RT–PCR (Table S5) and EMSA analysis (Table S6), bacterial strains (Tables S7 and S8) and plasmids (Table S9) used in the study are supplied in the supplementary information. Unless otherwise stated, all bacterial strains were purchased from the American Tissue Culture Collection. The following strains were provided by the Network on Antimicrobial Resistance in Staphylococcus aureus (NARSA) for distribution by BEI Resources (BEIResources.org), NIAID, NIH: Staphylococcus aureus subsp. aureus, Strain USA300 (JE2), Transposon Mutants NE754, NE896, NE1022, NE788 and NE792. Cation-adjusted Mueller Hinton II (Becton, Dickinson and Company, MD, USA) was used to propagate S. aureus. Antibacterial agents were obtained from Sigma-Aldrich.