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Waking the neighbours: disruption of H‐NS repression by overlapping transcription
Author(s) -
Wade Joseph T.,
Grainger David C.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
molecular microbiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.857
H-Index - 247
eISSN - 1365-2958
pISSN - 0950-382X
DOI - 10.1111/mmi.13939
Subject(s) - psychological repression , biology , nucleoid , transcription (linguistics) , dna , promoter , genetics , rna polymerase , histone , gene , dna binding protein , escherichia coli , microbiology and biotechnology , transcription factor , gene expression , linguistics , philosophy
Summary The histone‐like nucleoid structuring (H‐NS) protein and its analogues bind large stretches of horizontally acquired AT‐rich DNA in a broad range of bacterial species. Binding by H‐NS silences the promoters within such DNA that would otherwise deplete the cellular pool of RNA polymerase. Selective de‐repression can occur when sequence‐specific DNA‐binding proteins locally disrupt H‐NS function; this mechanism is important for the regulation of many virulence genes. In this issue of Molecular Microbiology , Rangarajan and Schnetz show that when transcription from a neighbouring region invades an H‐NS‐bound locus, it can disrupt local H‐NS repression. Moreover, they show that de‐repression occurs in a dose‐dependent manner, and they demonstrate a natural example of this in Escherichia coli . This finding has important implications for H‐NS function and its impact on genome evolution.