Gene expression levels in mutants with linear respiratory chain

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SysMO is a European transnational funding and research initiative on "Systems Biology of Microorganisms".

The goal pursued by SysMO was to record and describe the dynamic molecular processes going on in unicellular microorganisms in a comprehensive way and to present these processes in the form of computerized mathematical models.

Systems biology will raise biomedical and biotechnological research to a new quality level and contribute markedly to progress in understanding. Pooling European research ...

"Systems Understanding of Microbial Oxygen responses" (SUMO) investigates how Escherichia coli senses oxygen, or the associated changes in oxidation/reduction balance, via the Fnr and ArcA proteins, how these systems interact with other regulatory systems, and how the redox response of an E. coli population is generated from the responses of single cells. There are five sub-projects to determine system properties and behaviour and three sub-projects to employ different and complementary modelling ...

The electron transport chain of E. coli is branched. Different NAD Dehydrogenases and terminal oxidases are known to be expressed at different oxygen availabilities. By deleting multiple genes mutant strains were constructed that posses a linear electron transport chain. These mutants were investigated in continous bioreactor experiments with limiting glucose and varying oxygen supply.

A set of isogenic mutant strains was constructed which lack NADH Dehydrogenase I as well as two terminal oxidases, resulting in strains with linear respiratory chain. The different strains hence differ in the terminal oxidase and express either cytochrome bo, cytochrome bdI or cytochrome bdII. The different strains were cultivated in glucose-limited chemostats with defined low levels of oxygen supply. Biomass and by-product formation, gene expression and the phosphorylation state of the important ...

Mutant strains with linear electron transport chain were grown in chemostat cultures at different defined aerobiosis levels. Expression of selected genes was determined by Real Time RT-PCR