Genome-scale regulatory landscape of Escherichia coli in response to various environmental stresses

Environmental stresses such as metal iron depletion, oxidative stress, low pH stress, and osmotic stress greatly affect the cellular performance during fermentation. Understanding the genome-wide regulatory network in response to these stresses is important to rationally design microbes with improved tolerance towards them. In this study, we comprehensively reconstructed transcriptional regulatory networks of several transcription factors related to iron depletion, oxidative stress, low pH stress, and osmotic stress in Escherichia coli. Integrative data analysis from genome-wide measurements found that each transcription factor (TF) exhibits complex role in many fundamental cellular processes to coordinately overall respond of cells towards theses stresses. Functional analysis of newly found regulon members provide evidence of importance of those genes for survival under stress condition. These types of data can also provide more accurate information of regulation allowing us to design genomes for synthetic cells in the future.

Reference

Seo et al. Nat. Commun. 5:4910. 2014

Seo et al. Nat. Commun. 6:7970. 2015

Seo et al. Cell Rep. 12(8):1289-99. 2015