Hua Zhang
Si Zhou
Weihui Li
Zheng-Guo He
National Key Laboratory of Agricultural Microbiology, College of Life Science and Technology, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China
More InformationCorresponding author: E-mail address: hezhengguo@mail.hzau.edu.cn (Zheng-Guo He)
Received Date: 2018-05-01
Accepted Date:2018-06-26
Available Online: 2018-09-07 Publish Date:2018-09-20
Abstract
Abstract
Biofilm formation has been implicated to be tightly regulated in bacteria. Mycobacterial species possess a unique cell-wall structure; however, the underlying regulation mechanism for their biofilm formation remains largely unclear. In this study, we characterized a hypothetical mannitol metabolism and transportation gene cluster (Ms5571–Ms5576), designated as mmt operon, whose expression significantly contributes to the biofilm formation in Mycobacterium smegmatis. We showed that in the operon the Ms5575 gene encodes a GntR-like transcriptional repressor and the Ms5576 gene encodes a mannitol 2-dehydrogenase which can produce D-mannitol from D-mannose. Strikingly, the D-mannitol molecule can derepress the negative regulation of Ms5575 on the mmt operon to stimulate the operon's expression. Consistently, addition of D-mannitol into the medium can obviously induce mycobacterial biofilm formation. Furthermore, we found that Ms0179 positively regulates the mmt operon through its downstream regulator Ms0180. Ms0180 directly binds themmt operon to positively regulate its expression. Both Ms0179 and Ms0180 significantly affect the mycobacterial biofilm formation. Taken together, we explored a regulatory pathway for the mannitol metabolism and its coordination with the biofilm formation in M.?smegmatis. This finding provides novel insights into the unique mechanism of biofilm formation regulation in mycobacteria.Keywords: Transcription regulation,
Biofilm formation,
Mannitol,
Mycobacteria
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