Growth rate dependent control in Enterococcus faecalis: effects on the transcriptome, proteome and strong regulation of lactate dehydrogenase

Enterococcus faecalis V583 was grown in a glucose-limited chemostat at three different (0.05 h(-1), 0.15 h(-1) and 0.4 h(-1)) growth rates. The fermentation pattern changed with growth rate, from a mostly homolactic profile at high growth rate to a fermentation dominated by formate, acetate and ethanol production at low growth rate. A number of amino acids were consumed at the lower growth rates but not by fast growing cells. The change in metabolic profile was mainly caused by decreased flux through lactate dehydrogenase. Transcription of ldh-1, encoding the principal lactate dehydrogenase, showed very strong growth rate dependence and differed by three orders of magnitude between the highest and the lowest growth rates. Despite the increase in ldh-1 transcript, the content of the Ldh-1 protein was the same under all conditions. Using microarrays and qPCR the levels of 227 gene transcript were found to be affected by the growth rate, and 56 differentially expressed proteins were found by proteomic analyses. Few genes or proteins showed a growth rate-dependent increase or decrease in expression over the whole range of conditions, and many showed at maximum or minimum at the middle growth rate (D=0.15h(-1)). For many gene products a discrepancy between transcriptomic and proteomic data were seen, indicating post-transcriptional regulation of expression.