A novel family of Escherichia coli toxin-antitoxin gene pairs.

Journal of bacteriology ·Vol. 185 ·No. 22 ·2003-11-00 ·Pages 6600-8

Brown JM, Shaw KJ

Abstract

Bacterial toxin-antitoxin protein pairs (TA pairs) encode a toxin protein, which poisons cells by binding and inhibiting an essential enzyme, and an antitoxin protein, which binds the toxin and restores viability. We took an approach that did not rely on sequence homology to search for unidentified TA pairs in the genome of Escherichia coli K-12. Of 32 candidate genes tested, ectopic expression of 6 caused growth inhibition. In this report, we focus on the initial characterization of yeeV, ykfI, and ypjF, a novel family of toxin proteins. Coexpression of the gene upstream of each toxin restored the growth rate to that of the uninduced strain. Unexpectedly, we could not detect in vivo protein-protein interactions between the new toxin and antitoxin pairs. Instead, the antitoxins appeared to function by causing a large reduction in the level of cellular toxin protein.

MeSH Terms

Amino Acid Sequence Antitoxins/genetics,metabolism Bacterial Toxins/genetics,metabolism Escherichia coli/genetics,growth & development,metabolism Escherichia coli Proteins/genetics,metabolism Gene Expression Regulation, Bacterial Molecular Sequence Data Multigene Family Plasmids

Chemicals

Antitoxins Bacterial Toxins Escherichia coli Proteins

Authors & Affiliations

2 authors, click to expand affiliations / ORCID

Brown Jason M

Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development, LLC, La Jolla, California 92121, USA.

Shaw Karen Joy

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Article Info

Journal

Journal of bacteriology

Abbr.

J Bacteriol

ISSN

0021-9193

DOI

10.1128/JB.185.22.6600-6608.2003

Published

2003-11-00

Pages

6600-8

Language

English

Region

United States

NLM ID

2985120R

PMCID

PMC262102

Subset

External Links

PubMed source DOI: 10.1128/JB.185.22.6600-6608.2003 PMC Full Text View journal details

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A novel family of Escherichia coli toxin-antitoxin gene pairs.

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