Skip to main content
Article
Light Regulation of Swarming Motility in Pseudomonas syringae Integrates Signaling Pathways Mediated by a Bacteriophytochrome and a LOV Protein
mBio
  • Liang Wu, Iowa State University
  • Regina S. McGrane, Iowa State University
  • Gwyn A. Beattie, Iowa State University
Document Type
Article
Publication Version
Published Version
Publication Date
1-1-2013
DOI
10.1128/mBio.00334-13
Abstract

The biological and regulatory roles of photosensory proteins are poorly understood for nonphotosynthetic bacteria. The foliar bacterial pathogenPseudomonas syringae has three photosensory protein-encoding genes that are predicted to encode the blue-light-sensing LOV (light, oxygen, or voltage) histidine kinase (LOV-HK) and two red/far-red-light-sensing bacteriophytochromes, BphP1 and BphP2. We provide evidence that LOV-HK and BphP1 form an integrated network that regulates swarming motility in response to multiple light wavelengths. The swarming motility of P. syringae B728a deletion mutants indicated that LOV-HK positively regulates swarming motility in response to blue light and BphP1 negatively regulates swarming motility in response to red and far-red light. BphP2 does not detectably regulate swarming motility. The histidine kinase activity of each LOV-HK and BphP1 is required for this regulation based on the loss of complementation upon mutation of residues key to their kinase activity. Surprisingly, mutants lacking both lov and bphP1 were similar in motility to a bphP1 single mutant in blue light, indicating that the loss of bphP1 is epistatic to the loss of lov and also that BphP1 unexpectedly responds to blue light. Moreover, whereas expression of bphP1 did not alter motility under blue light in a bphP1 mutant, it reduced motility in a mutant lacking lov and bphP1, demonstrating that LOV-HK positively regulates motility by suppressing negative regulation by BphP1. These results are the first to show cross talk between the LOV protein and phytochrome signaling pathways in bacteria, and the similarity of this regulatory network to that of photoreceptors in plants suggests a possible common ancestry.

Comments

This article is from mBio 4 (2013): e00334-13, doi: 10.1128/mBio.00334-13. Posted with permission.

Rights
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, which permits unrestricted noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Copyright Owner
Wu et al.
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Citation Information
Liang Wu, Regina S. McGrane and Gwyn A. Beattie. "Light Regulation of Swarming Motility in Pseudomonas syringae Integrates Signaling Pathways Mediated by a Bacteriophytochrome and a LOV Protein" mBio Vol. 4 Iss. 3 (2013) p. e00334-13
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/gwyn-beattie/8/