Bacterial Transcription Regulation

Benno Müller‐Hill, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

Published online: March 2004

DOI: 10.1038/npg.els.0003828

Escherichia coli and possibly all other bacteria regulate transcription predominantly at the stage of initiation by repressors and/or activators.

Keywords: activation; activator; local concentration; -galactosidase; Lac permease; Escherichia coli; cyclic AMP; CAP protein; FNR protein; ONPG; IPTG; operator; repressor; inducer

Figure 1. The lac operator.
Figure 2. Model of Lac repressor. (a) The lac system. (b) (1) The lac promoter region. (2) Unrepressed transcription. (3) Repression by tetrameric Lac repressor binding to O1 and O3. The catabolite repressor protein (CAP) site and the PI promoter are depicted as being unoccupied. There is no evidence for or against this. (4) Repression by tetrameric Lac repressor binding to O1 and O2. It is likely but not explicitly demonstrated that the CAP and RNA polymerase are bound to their sites. From Oehler S, Amouyal M, Kolkhof P, Wilcken-Bergmann Bv and Müller-Hill B (1994) Quality and position of the three lac operators of E. coli define efficiency of repression. EMBO Journal 13: 3348–3355.
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 References
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    Bell CE and Lewis M (2001) The Lac repressor: a second generation of structural and functional studies. Current Opinion in Structural Biology 11: 19–25.
    Benoff B, Yang H, Lawson CL et al. (2002) Structural basis of transcription activation: the cap CTD-DNA complex. Science 297: 1562–1566.
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    Müller-Hill B (1998) The function of auxiliary operators. Molecular Microbiology 29: 13–18.
    book Müller-Hill B (2002) "What can be learned from the lacR family of Escherichia coli?" In: Hodgson DA and Thomas CM (eds) Sixty-first Symposium of the Society of General Microbiology, pp. 143–154. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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 Further Reading
    book Lwoff A and Ullmann A (eds) (1978) Selected Papers in Molecular Biology by Jacques Monod. London: Academic Press.
    book Miller JH and Reznikoff WS (eds) (1978) The Operon. Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.
    book Müller-Hill B (1998) The lac Operon. A Short History of a Genetic Paradigm. Berlin: de Gruyter.
    book Ptashne M (1987) A Genetic Switch. Phage and Higher Organisms. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Scientific.
    book Ptashne M and Gann A (2002) Genes & Signals. Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.
    book Steitz TA (1993) Structural Studies of Protein–Nucleic Acid Interaction. The Source of Sequence-Specific Binding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    book Wagner R (2000) Transcription Regulation in Prokaryotes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Related Sub-Topics:

Transcriptional Regulation | DNA Structure and Function | Bacteria | Genomes and Chromosomes
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Article Title: Bacterial Transcription Regulation
 
How to Cite close
Müller‐Hill, Benno(Mar 2004) Bacterial Transcription Regulation. In: eLS. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester. http://www.els.net [doi: 10.1038/npg.els.0003828]