On the other hand, the sgrS gene encodes a small protein of 43 amino acids called SgrT which is responsible for downregulation of glucose transport [25]. The recent discoveries of these two posttranscriptional regulatory mechanisms provide new approaches to control glucose uptake under various growth conditions. For example Negrete et al. managed to reduce acetate excretion of glucose fermenting E. coli cells by overexpressing SgrS [26]. Likewise, exclusive overproduction of SgrT led to a drastic reduction of cell growth in minimal medium with glucose Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical as a sole I-BET151 manufacturer carbon source [25]. This gave the first hint that

the Glc-PTS might be a direct target of SgrT and that the functions of SgrS and SgrT are redundant. Subsequently, Gabor et al. [27] repeated this Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical growth experiment using minimal medium with sucrose as a single carbon source. For this experiment, an E. coli derivative was used, which shares all the components of the typical PTS cascade with the Glc-PTS (EI, HPr, EIIAGlc) with the exception of the sucrose specific EIIBCScr [28]. This transporter

protein like the EIICBGlc belongs to the glucose/N-acetyl-glucosamine–sucrose/ß-glucosides superfamily of EII proteins [29]. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical However, the sucrose specific transporter has a different order of the two functional domains and lacks a conserved KTPGRED motif in the linker region between these two sites. Overproduction of SgrT did not interfere with cell growth in minimal medium with sucrose providing

a first hint that indeed EIICBGlc and no other component Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical of the Glc-PTS might be the SgrT target [27]. In this study we focused our interest on the regulation of EIICBGlc activity by SgrT. We identified the SgrT target sequence within EIICBGlc and characterized the interaction between the glucose transporter and the small regulatory peptide in Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical great detail. This may eventually lead to novel approaches to minimize metabolic overflow and thus improve the feasibility of the use of E. coli in biotechnological applications. 2. Results and Discussion 2.1. SgrT Binds to Dephosphorylated EIICBGlc in in vivo Crosslinking assays In order to test the assumption of a direct protein–protein interaction between SgrT and EIICBGlc, we performed an in vivo crosslinking experiment with paraformaldehyde. Phosphatidylinositol diacylglycerol-lyase With this method, even weak in vivo interactions between two proteins are detectable in the case that the proteins are in close proximity to each other (2 Å or less) [30]. To identify the two interaction partners in subsequent Western blots, both proteins were tagged with different flags (EIICBGlc-5His, SgrT-3HA). Both tagged proteins were fully functional in complementation assays, e.g., glucose transport in a ptsG deletion background in the case of the EIICBGlc-5His protein or reduction of growth in minimal medium with glucose as a sole carbon source in the case of the SgrT-3HA peptide [27].