Predicting gene-regulation functions: lessons from temperate bacteriophages.

ABSTRACT: Gene-regulation functions (GRF) provide a unique characteristic of a cis-regulatory module (CRM), relating the concentrations of transcription factors (input) to the promoter activities (output). The challenge is to predict GRFs from the sequence. Here we systematically consider the lysogeny-lysis CRMs of different temperate bacteriophages such as the Lactobacillus casei phage A2, Escherichia coli phages lambda, and 186 and Lactococcal phage TP901-1. This study allowed explaining a recent experimental puzzle on the role of Cro protein in the lambda switch. Several general conclusions have been drawn: 1), long-range interactions, multilayer assembly and DNA looping may lead to complex GRFs that cannot be described by linear functions of binding site occupancies; 2), in general, GRFs cannot

SUBMITTER: Teif VB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2849075 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature