Team:Hong Kong HKUST/pneumosensor/modules

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Overview

Pneumosensor primarily adopts the quorum sensing pathway components in Streptococcus pneumoniae. The autoinducer molecule, competence-stimulating peptide (CSP) is used as a reporter to detect populations of S. pneumoniae. Genes coding for the cognate CSP receptor, ComD and its response regulator ComE are migrated into our Pneumosensor as a detection platform. PcomCDE is induced by phosphorylated ComE and is adopted to express GFP to report the presence of S. pneumoniae.

Detection Module Description



Figure 1. Detection Module Diagram

CSP released by S. pneumoniae is detected by its receptor ComD, which autophosphorylates at the expenditure of ATP. ComD~P then phosphorylates ComE. ComE~P then induces the promoter PcomCDE, which drives the expression of GFP.

Transformation in Streptococcus pneumoniae, like many other species, depends on specialized state called competence. Competence is achieved during the exponential growth stage of pneumococcal culture by the secretion of competence-stimulating peptide (CSP), which is a 17- residue long pheromone that is species-specific.


Competence development controlled by a two-component regulatory system (TCS), which consists of the histidine kinase (HK) ComD and its cognate response regulator (RR) ComE. When CSP binds to it, ComD autophosphorylates to become phospho-ComD, ComD~P; at the expenditure of ATP. The cytosolic protein ComE is then phosphorylated by ComD~P through transphosphorylation reactions, producing ComE~P.


These two genes are part of the comCDE operon, which includes the comC gene (Pestova et al., 1996; Cheng et al., 1997) which encodes a prepeptide that is exported and matured by a dedicated ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transport protein, into CSP. The ABC transport protein is encoded by the comAB operon.


Interestingly, ComE~P binds to repeat sites adjacent to both comCDE and comAB (Ween et al., 1999), thereby creating a positive feedback loop, producing both pre-CSP and its required machinery for maturation and transport. The signal is thus amplified and competence is coordinated throughout the population. comD and comE genes were cloned out from the genomic DNA of the NCTC strain of S. pneumoniae. They would be contitutively expressed in our Pneumosensor.


As mentioned above, ComE~P induces several promoters, one of which is PcomCDE. In part 2 of our detecting circuit design, we make use of the inducible promoter PcomCDE. We obtain the sequence by oligos, and will characterize it with the help of green fluorescence protein (GFP) that we constructed in the downstream of the promoter by BioBrick RFC10. Rather than using ComE~P that has to be phosphorylated by ComD~P, which involves a chain of reactions, we use a phosphorylmimetic ComE mutant, ComED58E, gratefully shared by Bernard Martin et al. After characterization of PcomCDE, we hope to put PcomCDE together with Module 2 of our project, as the ultimate goal of our project is to make a system of automatic detection and lysis of S. pneumoniae.

References

B. Martin et al "ComE/ComE~P interplay dictates activation or extinction status of pneumococcal X-state (competence) " 2012

B. Martin et al "Cross-regulation of competence pheromone production and export in the early control of transformation in Streptococcus pneumoniae " 2000

B. Martin et al "Expression and maintenance of ComD–ComE, the two-component signal-transduction system that controls competence of Streptococcus pneumoniae mmi_7071 1513..1528 "

Cheng, Q., Campbell, E.A., Naughton, A.M., Johnson, S., and Masure, H.R. (1997) The com locus controls genetic transformation in Streptococcus pneumoniae. Mol Micro-biol 23: 683±692.

Pestova, E.V., and Morrison, D.A. (1998) Isolation and characterization of three Streptococcus pneumoniae transformation-specific loci by use of a lacZ reporter insertion vector. J Bacteriol 180: 2701±2710.

Ween, O., Gaustad, P., and Havarstein, L.S. (1999) Identification of DNA binding sites for ComE, a key regulator of natural competence in Streptococcus pneumoniae. Mol Microbiol 33: 817±827.

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