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Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access published online on November 28, 2008
Nucleic Acids Research, doi:10.1093/nar/gkn935
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© 2008 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Molecular Biology

The global bacterial regulator H-NS promotes transpososome formation and transposition in the Tn5 system

Crystal R. Whitfield, Simon J. Wardle and David B. Haniford*

Department of Biochemistry, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5C1

*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +1 519 661 4013; Fax: +1 519 661 3175; Email: haniford{at}uwo.ca

Received September 26, 2008. Revised November 3, 2008. Accepted November 5, 2008.

The histone-like nucleoid structuring protein (H-NS) is an important regulator of stress response and virulence genes in gram-negative bacteria. In addition to binding regulatory regions of genes in a structure-specific manner, H-NS also binds in a structure-specific manner to sites in the Tn10 transpososome, allowing it to act as a positive regulator of Tn10 transposition. This is the only example to date of H-NS regulating a transposition system by interacting directly with the transposition machinery. In general, transposition complexes tend to include segments of deformed DNA and given the capacity of H-NS to bind such structures, and the results from the Tn10 system, we asked if H-NS might regulate another transposition system (Tn5) by directly binding the transposition machinery. We show in the current work that H-NS does bind Tn5 transposition complexes and use hydroxyl radical footprinting to characterize the H-NS interaction with the Tn5 transpososome. We also show that H-NS can promote Tn5 transpososome formation in vitro, which correlates with the Tn5 system showing a dependence on H-NS for transposition in vivo. Taken together the results suggest that H-NS might play an important role in the regulation of many different bacterial transposition systems and thereby contribute directly to lateral gene transfer.


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S. J. Wardle, A. Chan, and D. B. Haniford
H-NS binds with high affinity to the Tn10 transpososome and promotes transpososome stabilization
Nucleic Acids Res., October 1, 2009; 37(18): 6148 - 6160.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


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