Affiliation:
1. Department of Microbiology, Institute of Biomedical Sciences, São Paulo University, São Paulo, Brazil
Abstract
ABSTRACT
The SOS regulon is a paradigm of bacterial responses to DNA damage. A wide variety of bacterial species possess homologs of
lexA
and
recA
, the central players in the regulation of the SOS circuit. Nevertheless, the genes actually regulated by the SOS have been determined only experimentally in a few bacterial species. In this work, we describe 37 genes regulated in a LexA-dependent manner in the alphaproteobacterium
Caulobacter crescentus
. In agreement with previous results, we have found that the direct repeat GTTCN
7
GTTC is the SOS operator of
C. crescentus
, which was confirmed by site-directed mutagenesis studies of the
imuA
promoter. Several potential promoter regions containing the SOS operator were identified in the genome, and the expression of the corresponding genes was analyzed for both the wild type and the
lexA
strain, demonstrating that the vast majority of these genes are indeed SOS regulated. Interestingly, many of these genes encode proteins with unknown functions, revealing the potential of this approach for the discovery of novel genes involved in cellular responses to DNA damage in prokaryotes, and illustrating the diversity of SOS-regulated genes among different bacterial species.
Publisher
American Society for Microbiology
Subject
Molecular Biology,Microbiology
Cited by
56 articles.
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