Lrp, a major regulatory protein in Escherichia coli, bends DNA and can organize the assembly of a higher-order nucleoprotein structure.

Lrp (Leucine-responsive regulatory protein) is a global regulatory protein that controls the expression of many operons in Escherichia coli. One of those operons, ilvIH, contains six Lrp binding sites located within a several hundred base pair region upstream of the promoter region. Analysis of the binding of Lrp to a set of circularly permuted DNA fragments from this region indicates that Lrp induces DNA bending. The results of DNase I footprinting experiments suggest that Lrp binding to this region facilitates the formation of a higher-order nucleoprotein structure. To define more precisely the degree of bending associated with Lrp binding, one or two binding sites were separately cloned into a pBend vector and analyzed. Lrp induced a bend of approximately 52 degrees upon binding to a single binding site, and the angle of bending is increased to at least 135 degrees when Lrp binds to two adjacent sites. Lrp-induced DNA bending, and a natural sequence-directed bend that exists within ilvIH DNA, may be architectural elements that facilitate the assembly of a nucleoprotein complex.     

The tdh and serA operons of Escherichia coli: mutational analysis of the regulatory elements of leucine-responsive genes.

The tdh promoter of Escherichia coli is induced seven- to eightfold when cells are grown in the presence of exogenous leucine. A scheme was devised to select mutants that exhibited high constitutive expression of the tdh promoter. The mutations in these strains were shown to lie within a previously identified gene (lrp) that encodes Lrp (leucine-responsive regulatory protein). By deletion analysis, the site of action of Lrp was localized to a 25-bp region between coordinates -69 and -44 of the tdh promoter. Disruption of a 12-bp presumptive target sequence found in this region of tdh resulted in constitutively derepressed expression from the tdh promoter. Similar DNA segments (consensus, TTTATTCtNaAT) were also identified in a number of other promoters, including each of the Lrp-regulated promoters whose nucleotide sequence is known. The sequence of the promoter region of serA, an Lrp-regulated gene, was determined. No Lrp consensus target sequence was present upstream of serA, suggesting that Lrp acts indirectly on the serA promoter. A previously described mutation in a leucine-responsive trans-acting factor, LivR (J. J. Anderson, S. C. Quay, and D. L. Oxender, J. Bacteriol. 126:80-90, 1976), resulted in constitutively repressed expression from the tdh promoter and constitutively induced expression from the serA promoter. The possibility that LivR and Lrp are allelic is discussed.     

The mechanism by which DNA adenine methylase and PapI activate the pap epigenetic switch

The expression of pyelonephritis-associated pili (Pap) in uropathogenic Escherichia coli is epigenetically controlled by a reversible OFF to ON switch. In phase OFF cells, the global regulator Lrp is bound to pap sites proximal to the pilin promoter, whereas in phase ON cells, Lrp is bound to promoter distal sites. We have found that the local regulator PapI increases the affinity of Lrp for the sequence "ACGATC," which contains the target "GATC" site for DNA adenine methylase (Dam) and is present in both promoter proximal and distal sites. Mutational analyses show that methylation of the promoter proximal GATC(prox) site by Dam is required for transition to the phase ON state by specifically blocking PapI-dependent binding of Lrp to promoter proximal sites. Furthermore, our data support the hypothesis that PapI-dependent binding of Lrp to a hemimethylated GATC(dist) site generated by DNA replication is a critical component of the switch mechanism.