Abstract
Transcriptional noise is a necessary consequence of the molecular events that drive gene expression in prokaryotes. However, some environmental microorganisms that inhabit polluted sites, for example, the m-xylene degrading soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida mt-2 seem to have co-opted evolutionarily such a noise for deploying a metabolic diversification strategy that allows a cautious exploration of new chemical landscapes. We have examined this phenomenon under the light of deterministic and stochastic models for activation of the main promoter of the master m-xylene responsive promoter of the system (Pu) by its cognate transcriptional factor (XylR). These analyses consider the role of co-factors for Pu activation and determinants of xylR mRNA translation. The model traces the onset and eventual disappearance of the bimodal distribution of Pu activity along time to the growth-phase dependent abundance of XylR itself, that is, very low in exponentially growing cells and high in stationary. This tenet was validated by examining the behaviour of a Pu-GFP fusion in a P. putida strain in which xylR expression was engineered under the control of an IPTG-inducible system. This work shows how a relatively simple regulatory scenario (for example, growth-phase dependent expression of a limiting transcription factor) originates a regime of phenotypic diversity likely to be advantageous in competitive environmental settings.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Angel Goñi for critical reading of the manuscript. This work was supported by the CAMBIOS Program of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, the ARISYS, EVOPROG and EMPOWERPUTIDA Contracts of the EU, The ERANET-IB and the PROMT Project of the CAM. RG acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (grant BFU2013-45918-R) and the AIRBIOTA project of the CAM.
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Guantes, R., Benedetti, I., Silva-Rocha, R. et al. Transcription factor levels enable metabolic diversification of single cells of environmental bacteria. ISME J 10, 1122–1133 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2015.193
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2015.193
