Nitrogen stress response and stringent response are coupled in Escherichia coli

Daniel R. Brown, Geraint Barton, Zhensheng Pan, Martin Buck and Sivaramesh Wigneshweraraj ()
Additional contact information
Daniel R. Brown: MRC Centre for Molecular Bacteriology and Infection
Geraint Barton: Centre for Systems Biology and Bioinformatics
Zhensheng Pan: MRC Centre for Molecular Bacteriology and Infection
Martin Buck: Imperial College London
Sivaramesh Wigneshweraraj: MRC Centre for Molecular Bacteriology and Infection

Nature Communications, 2014, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Assimilation of nitrogen is an essential process in bacteria. The nitrogen regulation stress response is an adaptive mechanism used by nitrogen-starved Escherichia coli to scavenge for alternative nitrogen sources and requires the global transcriptional regulator NtrC. In addition, nitrogen-starved E. coli cells synthesize a signal molecule, guanosine tetraphosphate (ppGpp), which serves as an effector molecule of many processes including transcription to initiate global physiological changes, collectively termed the stringent response. The regulatory mechanisms leading to elevated ppGpp levels during nutritional stresses remain elusive. Here, we show that transcription of relA, a key gene responsible for the synthesis of ppGpp, is activated by NtrC during nitrogen starvation. The results reveal that NtrC couples these two major bacterial stress responses to manage conditions of nitrogen limitation, and provide novel mechanistic insights into how a specific nutritional stress leads to elevating ppGpp levels in bacteria.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms5115 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:5:y:2014:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms5115

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms5115

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().