The pyrimidine biosynthesis operon of the thermophile Bacillus caldolyticus includes genes for uracil phosphoribosyltransferase and uracil permease

Abstract

A 3-kb DNA segment of the Bacillus caldolyticus genome including the 5' end end of the pyr cluster has been cloned and sequenced. The sequence revealed the presence of two open reading frames, pyrR and pyrP, located immediately upstream of the previously sequenced pyrB gene encoding the pyrimidine biosynthesis enzyme aspartate transcarbamoylase. The pyrR and pyrP genes encoded polypeptides with calculated molecular masses of 19.9 and 45.2 kDa, respectively. Expression of these ORFs was confirmed by analysis of plasmid-encoded polypeptides in minicells. Sequence alignment and complementation analyses identified the pyrR gene product as a uracil phosphoribosyltransferase and the pyrP gene product as a membrane-bound uracil permease. By using promoter expression vectors, a 650-bp EcoRI-HincII fragment, including the 5' end of pyrR and its upstream region, was found to contain the pyr operon promoter. The transcriptional start point was located by primer extension at a position 153 bp upstream of the pyrR translation initiation codon, 7 bp 3' of a sequence resembling a sigma A-dependent Bacillus subtilis promoter. This established the following organization of the ten cistrons within the pyr operon: promoter-pyrR-pyrP-pyrB-pyrC-pyrAa-pyrA b-orf2-pyrD-pyrF-pyrE. The nucleotide sequences of the region upstream of pyrR and of the pyrR-pyrP and pyrP-pyrB intercistronic regions indicated that the transcript may form two mutually exclusive secondary structures within each of these regions. One of these structures resembled a rho-independent transcriptional terminator. The possible implication of these structures for pyrimidine regulation of the operon is discussed.