Defensive Function of Transposable Elements in Bacteria. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • It has been widely debated whether transposable elements have a positive or a negative effect on their host cells. This study demonstrated that transposable elements, specifically insertion sequences (ISs), can adopt a defensive role in Escherichia coli. In three different E. coli strains (S17, DH5α, and Nissle 1917), IS1 and IS10 rapidly disrupted the I-CeuI gene (encoding I-CeuI endonuclease) on the plasmid pLO11-ICeuI as early as the first generation, despite the gene-circuit being under control of an arabinose promoter. Proteomics analysis showed that the protein abundance profile of E. coli DH5α with pLO11-ICeuI in the fifth generation was nearly opposite to that of control strain (E. coli with pLO11, no I-CeuI). The DNA damage caused by the leaky expression of I-CeuI was enough to trigger a SOS response and alter lipid synthesis, ribosomal activity, RNA/DNA metabolism, central dogma and cell cycle processes in E. coli DH5α. After the ISs disrupted the expression of I-CeuI, cells fully recovered by the 31st generation had a protein abundance profile similar to that of the control strain. This study showed that ISs readily mutated a harmful gene which subsequently restored host fitness. These observations have implications for the stability of designed gene circuits in synthetic biology.

publication date

  • August 19, 2019

Research

keywords

  • DNA Transposable Elements
  • Escherichia coli

Identity

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 85071724264

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1021/acssynbio.9b00218

PubMed ID

  • 31375026

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 8

issue

  • 9