Affiliation:
1. Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
Abstract
ABSTRACT
Mycoplasma genitalium
is an emerging sexually transmitted pathogen associated with reproductive tract disease in men and women, and it can persist for months to years despite the development of a robust antibody response. Mechanisms that may contribute to persistence
in vivo
include phase and antigenic variation of the MgpB and MgpC adhesins. These processes occur by segmental recombination between discrete variable regions within
mgpB
and
mgpC
and multiple archived donor sequences termed MgPa repeats (MgPars). The molecular factors governing
mgpB
and
mgpC
variation are poorly understood and obscured by the paucity of recombination genes conserved in the
M. genitalium
genome. Recently, we demonstrated the requirement for RecA using a quantitative PCR (qPCR) assay developed to measure recombination between the
mgpB
and
mgpC
genes and MgPars. Here, we expand these studies by examining the roles of
M. genitalium
ruvA
and
ruvB
homologs. Deletion of
ruvA
and
ruvB
impaired the ability to generate
mgpB
and
mgpC
phase and sequence variants, and these deficiencies could be complemented with wild-type copies, including the
ruvA
gene from
Mycoplasma pneumoniae
. In contrast,
ruvA
and
ruvB
deletions did not affect the sensitivity to UV irradiation, reinforcing our previous findings that the recombinational repair pathway plays a minor role in
M. genitalium
. Reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR) and primer extension analyses also revealed a complex transcriptional organization of the RuvAB system of
M. genitalium
, which is cotranscribed with two novel open reading frames (ORFs) (termed ORF1 and ORF2 herein) conserved only in
M. pneumoniae
. These findings suggest that these novel ORFs may play a role in recombination in these two closely related bacteria.
Publisher
American Society for Microbiology
Subject
Molecular Biology,Microbiology
Cited by
16 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献