Affiliation:
1. Department of Microbiology, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia
Abstract
ABSTRACT
The O antigen is a polymer with a repeated unit. The chain length in most
Escherichia coli
strains has a modal value of 10 to 18 O units, but other strains have higher or lower modal values.
wzz
(
cld/rol
) mutants have a random chain length distribution, showing that the modal distribution is determined by the Wzz protein. Cloned
wzz
genes from
E. coli
strains with short (7 to 16), intermediate (10 to 18), and long (16 to 25) modal chain lengths were transferred to a model system, and their effects on O111 antigen were studied. The O111 chain length closely resembled that of the parent strains. We present data based on the construction of chimeric
wzz
genes and site-directed mutagenesis of the
wzz
gene to show that the modal value of O-antigen chain length of
E. coli
O1, O2, O7, and O157 strains can be changed by specific amino acid substitutions in
wzz
. It is concluded that the O-antigen chain length heterogeneity in
E. coli
strains is the result of amino acid sequence variation of the Wzz protein.
Publisher
American Society for Microbiology
Subject
Molecular Biology,Microbiology
Cited by
82 articles.
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