From sequence to dynamics: the effects of transcription factor and polymerase concentration changes on activated and repressed promoters

The fine tuning of two features of the bacterial regulatory machinery have been known to contribute to the diversity of gene expression within the same regulon: the sequence of Transcription Factor (TF) binding sites, and their location with respect to promoters. While variations of binding sequences modulate the strength of the interaction between the TF and its binding sites, the distance between binding sites and promoters alter the interaction between the TF and the RNA polymerase (RNAP)...(AU)

Impact of Transcription Units rearrangement on the evolution of the regulatory network of gamma-proteobacteria.

BACKGROUND: In the past years, several studies begun to unravel the structure, dynamical properties, and evolution of transcriptional regulatory networks. However, even those comparative studies that focus on a group of closely related organisms are limited by the rather scarce knowledge on regulatory interactions outside a few model organisms, such as E. coli among the prokaryotes. RESULTS: In this paper we used the information annotated in Tractor_DB (a database of regulatory networks in gamma-proteobacteria) to calculate a normalized Site Orthology Score (SOS) that quantifies the conservation of a regulatory link across thirty genomes of this subclass. Then we used this SOS to assess how regulatory connections have evolved in this group, and how the variation of basic regulatory connection is reflected on the structure of the chromosome. We found that individual regulatory interactions shift between different organisms, a process that may be described as rewiring the network. At this evolutionary scale (the gamma-proteobacteria subclass) this rewiring process may be an important source of variation of regulatory incoming interactions for individual networks. We also noticed that the regulatory links that form feed forward motifs are conserved in a better correlated manner than triads of random regulatory interactions or pairs of co-regulated genes. Furthermore, the rewiring process that takes place at the most basic level of the regulatory network may be linked to rearrangements of genetic material within bacterial chromosomes, which change the structure of Transcription Units and therefore the regulatory connections between Transcription Factors and structural genes. CONCLUSION: The rearrangements that occur in bacterial chromosomes-mostly inversion or horizontal gene transfer events - are important sources of variation of gene regulation at this evolutionary scale.

Complementing computationally predicted regulatory sites in Tractor_DB using a pattern matching approach / s. t

Prokaryotic genomes annotation has focused on genes location and function. The lack of regulatory information has limited the knowledge on cellular transcriptional regulatory networks. However, as more phylogenetically close genomes are sequenced and annotated, the implementation of phylogenetic footprinting strategies for the recognition of regulators and their regulons becomes more important. In this paper we describe a comparative genomics approach to the prediction of new gamma-proteobacterial regulon members. We take advantage of the phylogenetic proximity of Escherichia coli and other 16 organisms of this subdivision and the intensive search of the space sequence provided by a pattern-matching strategy. Using this approach we complement predictions of regulatory sites made using statistical models currently stored in Tractor_DB, and increase the number of transcriptional regulators with predicted binding sites up to 86...(AU)