Conservation of two-component signal transduction systems in E. coli, Salmonella, and across 100,000 bacteria of various bacterial phyla

摘要: The number of publicly available bacterial genome sequences has reached 100,000 and continues to increase rapidly. Mining such a large dataset for gene content requires proper strategies, both in terms of quality control and finding functionally related genes that may share little sequence similarity. This is demonstrated here by comparison of bacterial two-component signal transduction systems (2CSTS), which mediate the environmental adaptability of bacteria. These systems typically consist of a sensor histidine kinase (HK) and a response regulator (RR). The HK detects environmental cues and transmits a signal to the intracellular RR, which mediates the cell’s response by changes in gene expression. Since members of a bacterial species usually thrive in similar environments, we hypothesized that the number and nature of HKs and RRs would be conserved across all members within a species …