The design of artificial nestboxes for the study of secondary hole-nesting birds: a review of methodological inconsistencies and potential biases. Acta Ornithol. 45: 1-26.
Sporulation of Bacillus subtilis involves sequential morphological and biochemical changes and is regulated by specific genes (spo genes) estimated to occupy more than 30 loci. A mutation in any one of these genes blocks the sporulation process at the corresponding developmental stage. Despite intensive genetic studies, the nature and function of the spo gene products remain unknown. Vegetative B. subtilis RNA polymerase core enzyme may interact with several sigma factors and discriminate among different classes of promoters. During sporulation, new polypeptides are associated with the core enzyme which may have a central role in modifying its promoter recognition specificity. As a first step to understanding their function in the switch from vegetative to sporulation mode, several early sporulation genes have been cloned and analysed. Here we report the cloning and nucleotide sequence of the spoIIG gene of B. subtilis. This gene encodes a polypeptide with a predicted relative molecular mass of 27,652 which contains a 65-amino acid region highly homologous to an internal part of the Escherichia coli sigma factor.
Sequences of the sigma factors of Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis were aligned with the sequences of two sigma-like proteins, HtpR, involved in the expression of heat-shock genes in E. coli, and SpoIIG, necessary for endospore formation in B. subtilis. An internal region is highly conserved in the four proteins and is proposed to be involved in binding of sigma factors to core RNA polymerase. The carboxy-terminal part of the four proteins presents the characteristic structure found in several prokaryotic DNA-binding proteins and is proposed to be involved in promoter recognition.
Sigma factor RNA polymerase PromoterEscherichia coli Bacillus subtilis
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