Fig. 4
Impact of natural mutations in the appearance and disruption of Pribnow boxes. a Effect of the new/disrupted Pribnow boxes over the expression of downstream genes. New boxes tend to upregulate gene expression while disrupted boxes tend to downregulate transcription (wilcoxon test, p-value = 5.37-E09). Blue circles represent those changes in expression detected in the PDEG analysis (adj-pval < 0.05, log2 fold-change in expression > 1.5). Red circles represent subtle changes in gene expression, thus not identified by the PDEG analyses. b New Pribnow boxes can increase sense and/or antisense expression, depending on the genomic context in which the mutation appears. c The G2726105A mutation, common to all L3 strains, creates two new Pribnow boxes in the intergenic region of oxyR and ahpC. These new boxes are the potential explanation for the observed upregulation of oxyR, ahpC and ahpD in the L3 strains
