Evolutionary rewiring of bacterial regulatory networks
Authors:Tiffany B. Taylor1,*, Geraldine Mulley1, Liam J. McGuffin1, Louise J. Johnson1, Michael A. Brockhurst2, Tanya Arseneault1,3, Mark W. Silby4 and Robert W. Jackson1,5
doi: 10.15698/mic2015.07.215
Volume 2, pp. 256 to 258, published 06/07/2015.
1 School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading, Whiteknights, Reading RG6 6AJ, UK.
2 Department of Biology, University of York, Wentworth Way, York YO10 5DD, UK.
3 Department of Biology, Université de Moncton, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.
4 Department of Biology, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 285 Old Westport Road, North Dartmouth, MA 02747, USA.
5 The University of Akureyri, Borgir vid Nordurslod, IS-600 Akureyri, Iceland.
Keywords:
bacterial motility, flagella regulation, nitrogen regulation, gene network evolution, enhancing binding proteins
Corresponding Author(s):
Conflict of interest statement:
The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
Please cite this article as:
Tiffany B. Taylor, Geraldine Mulley, Liam J. McGuffin, Louise J. Johnson, Michael A. Brockhurst, Tanya Arseneault, Mark W. Silby and Robert W. Jackson (2015). Evolutionary rewiring of bacterial regulatory networks. Microbial Cell 2(7): 256-258.
© 2015 Taylor et al. This is an open-access article released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are acknowledged.
Abstract:
Bacteria have evolved complex regulatory networks that enable integration of multiple intracellular and extracellular signals to coordinate responses to environmental changes. However, our knowledge of how regulatory systems function and evolve is still relatively limited. There is often extensive homology between components of different networks, due to past cycles of gene duplication, divergence, and horizontal gene transfer, raising the possibility of cross-talk or redundancy. Consequently, evolutionary resilience is built into gene networks – homology between regulators can potentially allow rapid rescue of lost regulatory function across distant regions of the genome. In our recent study [Taylor, et al. Science (2015), 347(6225)] we find that mutations that facilitate cross-talk between pathways can contribute to gene network evolution, but that such mutations come with severe pleiotropic costs. Arising from this work are a number of questions surrounding how this phenomenon occurs.