BioProject

An ability to sense and respond to changes in extracellular phosphate is critical to the survival of most bacteria. More...

An ability to sense and respond to changes in extracellular phosphate is critical to the survival of most bacteria. For Caulobacter crescentus, which typically lives in phosphate-limited environments, this process is especially crucial. Like many bacteria, Caulobacter responds to phosphate limitation through a conserved two-component signaling pathway called PhoR-PhoB, but the direct regulon of PhoB in this organism is unknown. Here, we use ChIP-Seq to map the global binding patterns of the phosphate-responsive transcriptional regulator PhoB in both phosphate-limited and -replete conditions. Combined with genome-wide expression profiling, our work demonstrates that PhoB is induced to regulate nearly 50 genes in phosphate-starved conditions. The PhoB regulon is comprised primarily of genes known or predicted to help Caulobacter scavenge for and import inorganic phosphate, including 15 different membrane transporters. We also investigated the regulatory role of PhoU, a widely conserved protein proposed to coordinate phosphate import with expression of the PhoB regulon by directly modulating the histidine kinase PhoR. However, our studies show that it likely does not play such a role in Caulobacter as depleting PhoU has no significant effect on PhoB-dependent gene expression. Instead, cells lacking PhoU exhibit a striking accumulation of large polyphosphate granules suggesting that PhoU participates in controlling intracellular phosphate metabolism. Overall design: An allele of phoB bearing a C-terminal 3x-flag tag was integrated at its native locus, and ChIP followed by deep sequencing on Illumina MiSeq was performed on samples grown in rich medium, phosphate-limited medium, and in a pstS::Tn5 mutant background in rich medium. Less...