Lucchini, Sacha, Rowley, Gary ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5421-4333, Goldberg, Martin D., Hurd, Douglas, Harrison, Marcus and Hinton, Jay C. D.
(2006)
H-NS mediates the silencing of laterally acquired genes in bacteria.
PLoS Pathogens, 2 (8).
ISSN 1553-7366
Abstract
Histone-like nucleoid structuring protein (H-NS) is a modular protein that is associated with the bacterial nucleoid. We used chromatin immunoprecipitation to determine the binding sites of H-NS and RNA polymerase on the Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium chromosome. We found that H-NS does not bind to actively transcribed genes and does not co-localize with RNA polymerase. This shows that H-NS principally silences gene expression by restricting the access of RNA polymerase to the DNA. H-NS had previously been shown to preferentially bind to curved DNA in vitro. In fact, at the genomic level we discovered that the level of H-NS binding correlates better with the AT-content of DNA. This is likely to have evolutionary consequences because we show that H-NS binds to many Salmonella genes acquired by lateral gene transfer, and functions as a gene silencer. The removal of H-NS from the cell causes un-controlled expression of several Salmonella pathogenicity islands, and we demonstrate that this has deleterious consequences for bacterial fitness. Our discovery of this novel role for H-NS may have implications for the acquisition of foreign genes by enteric bacteria.
Item Type: | Article |
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Additional Information: | © 2006 Lucchini et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Science > School of Biological Sciences |
UEA Research Groups: | Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Molecular Microbiology |
Depositing User: | EPrints Services |
Date Deposited: | 01 Oct 2010 13:38 |
Last Modified: | 23 Jul 2024 00:24 |
URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/1471 |
DOI: | 10.1371/journal.ppat.0020081 |
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