Transmission of an oxygen availability signal at the Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium fis promoter

PLoS One. 2013 Dec 16;8(12):e84382. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0084382. eCollection 2013.

Abstract

The nucleoid-associated protein FIS is a global regulator of gene expression and chromosome structure in Escherichia coli and Salmonella enterica. Despite the importance of FIS for infection and intracellular invasion, very little is known about the regulation of S. enterica fis expression. Under standard laboratory growth conditions, fis is highly expressed during rapid growth but is then silenced as growth slows. However, if cells are cultured in non-aerated conditions, fis expression is sustained during stationary phase. This led us to test whether the redox-sensing transcription factors ArcA and FNR regulate S. enterica fis. Deletion of FNR had no detectable effect, whereas deletion of ArcA had the unexpected effect of further elevating fis expression in stationary phase. ArcA required RpoS for induction of fis expression, suggesting that ArcA indirectly affects fis expression. Other putative regulators were found to play diverse roles: FIS acted directly as an auto-repressor (as expected), whereas CRP had little direct effect on fis expression. Deleting regions of the fis promoter led to the discovery of a novel anaerobically-induced transcription start site (Pfis-2) upstream of the primary transcription start site (Pfis-1). Promoter truncation also revealed that the shortest functional fis promoter was incapable of sustained expression. Moreover, fis expression was observed to correlate directly with DNA supercoiling in non-aerated conditions. Thus, the full-length S. enterica fis promoter region may act as a topological switch that is sensitive to stress-induced duplex destabilisation and up-regulates expression in non-aerated conditions.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Bacterial Outer Membrane Proteins / metabolism
  • Base Sequence
  • Escherichia coli Proteins / chemistry
  • Escherichia coli Proteins / genetics
  • Factor For Inversion Stimulation Protein / chemistry
  • Factor For Inversion Stimulation Protein / genetics*
  • Factor For Inversion Stimulation Protein / metabolism
  • Gene Expression Regulation, Bacterial*
  • Gene Order
  • Molecular Sequence Data
  • Mutation
  • Oxygen / metabolism*
  • Promoter Regions, Genetic*
  • Regulatory Sequences, Nucleic Acid
  • Repressor Proteins / metabolism
  • Salmonella typhimurium / genetics*
  • Salmonella typhimurium / metabolism
  • Sequence Alignment
  • Transcription Factors / genetics
  • Transcription Factors / metabolism

Substances

  • Bacterial Outer Membrane Proteins
  • Escherichia coli Proteins
  • Factor For Inversion Stimulation Protein
  • Fis protein, E coli
  • Repressor Proteins
  • Transcription Factors
  • Oxygen

Grants and funding

This work was supported by Science Foundation Ireland grant number 07/IN1/B918 (CJD), a University of Regina startup grant and a Society for General Microbiology President’s Fund Research Travel grant (ADSC). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.