Project description:Parageobacillus thermoglucosidasius is a thermophilic Gram-positive that is currently on the rise as a potential platform for sustainable chemical production. One major issue with P. thermoglucosidasius as a host is its natural ability to sporulate in response to nutrient starvation, as endospore formation is generally undesired in industrial fermentations. It is therefore of interest to instead employ a sporulation-supressed variant of P. thermoglucosidasius. However, as a non-model species, the complex regulatory system that governs sporulation in P. thermoglucosidasius is currently poorly characterised. This study presents a characterisation and proteomic analysis of the P. thermoglucosidasius wildtype strain alongside four early-stage sporulation-inhibited variants. The genes targeted for sporulation-inhibition were Spo0A, Spo0B, Spo0F, and SigF, based on their regulatory roles in the sporulation pathway of Bacillus subtilis. Proteomics data was collected from four different growth stages and the resulting expression profiles were compared. This led to the identification of a co-expression module consisting of approximately 200 genes, which through enrichment was confirmed to be closely linked to the P. thermoglucosidasius sporulation pathway. The results of the analysis have been made publicly available.
