Open AccessEffects of starvation for exogenous carbon on functional mRNA stability and rate of peptide chain elongation in Escherichia coli
Author(s) -
Albertson Nan H.,
Nyström Thomas
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
fems microbiology letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.899
H-Index - 151
eISSN - 1574-6968
pISSN - 0378-1097
DOI - 10.1111/j.1574-6968.1994.tb06762.x
Subject(s) - escherichia coli , messenger rna , elongation , starvation , transcription (linguistics) , biology , gene expression , protein biosynthesis , peptide , biochemistry , gene , endocrinology , linguistics , materials science , philosophy , ultimate tensile strength , metallurgy
The decay rate of the potential to synthesize proteins after complete inhibition of transcription by rifampicin was analyzed to determine the functional mRNA stability of exponentially growing and glucose‐starved Escherichia coli B and K12 cells. We found the following: (i) The half‐life of the mRNA pool increased 2.2‐fold during a period of 2 h of starvation (from 1.8 min in exponentially growing cells to 4.0 min for starved for 2 h); (ii) the effect on transcript stability appeared to be global since transcripts of genes that were induced, repressed or unaltered in their expression during starvation exhibited more or less the same increased stability; (iii) the rate of peptide chain elongation, as measured by the synthesis time for β‐galactosidase, decreased 1.9‐fold during the starvation period studied and may, at least in part, account for the global stabilization of transcripts in starved cells.