Small, low, but potent: the complex regulatory role of the small RNA SolB on solventogenesis in Clostridium acetobutylicum.

Small, low, but potent: the complex regulatory role of the small RNA SolB on solventogenesis in Clostridium acetobutylicum. Appl Environ Microbiol. 2018 May 04;: Authors: Jones AJ, Fast AG, Clupper M, Papoutsakis ET Abstract The recently revived Clostridium acetobutylicum based Acetone-Butanol-Ethanol (ABE) fermentation is widely celebrated and studied for its impact on industrial biotechnology. C. acetobutylicum has been extensively studied and engineered, yet critical areas of the molecular basis of how solvent formation is regulated remain unresolved. The core solventogenic genes (adhE1/aad, ctfA, ctfB, adc) are coded on the sol locus of the pSOL1 megaplasmid, whose loss leads to asporogenous, "degenerate" cells. The sol locus includes a noncoding sRNA, SolB, whose role is presumed as critical for solventogenesis, but has eluded resolution. Here, SolB overexpression downregulated the sol-locus genes at the transcript level, resulting in attenuated protein expression and a solvent-deficient phenotype, thus suggesting that SolB affects expression of all sol-locus transcripts and seemingly validating its hypothesized role as a repressor. However, deletion of solB resulted in total loss of acetone production and severe attenuation of butanol formation, but with complex effects on sol-locus genes and proteins: it had a small impact on adc mRNA or its corresponding protein (acetoacetate decarboxylase) expression, somewhat reduced adhE1 ...
Source: Applied and Environmental Microbiology - Category: Microbiology Authors: Tags: Appl Environ Microbiol Source Type: research