Rapid Accumulation of Motility-Activating Mutations in Resting Liquid Culture of Escherichia coli.

ABSTRACT: Expression of motility genes is a potentially beneficial but costly process in bacteria. Interestingly, many isolate strains of Escherichia coli possess motility genes but have lost the ability to activate them under conditions in which motility is advantageous, raising the question of how they respond to these situations. Through transcriptome profiling of strains in the E. coli single-gene knockout Keio collection, we noticed drastic upregulation of motility genes in many of the deletion strains compared to levels in their weakly motile parent strain (BW25113). We show that this switch to a motile phenotype is not a direct consequence of the genes deleted but is instead due to a variety of secondary mutations that increase the expression of the major motility regulator, Flh

SUBMITTER: Parker DJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6755740 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature