Characterization of the light-regulated operon encoding the phycoerythrin-associated linker proteins from the cyanobacterium Fremyella diplosiphon.

Many biological processes in photosynthetic organisms can be regulated by light quantity or light quality or both. A unique example of the effect of specific wavelengths of light on the composition of the photosynthetic apparatus occurs in cyanobacteria that undergo complementary chromatic adaptation. These organisms alter the composition of their light-harvesting organelle, the phycobilisome, and exhibit distinct morphological features as a function of the wavelength of incident light. Fremyella diplosiphon, a filamentous cyanobacterium, responds to green light by activating transcription of the cpeBA operon, which encodes the pigmented light-harvesting component phycoerythrin. We have isolated and determined the complete nucleotide sequence of another operon, cpeCD, that encodes the linker proteins associated with phycoerythrin hexamers in the phycobilisome. The cpeCD operon is activated in green light and expressed as two major transcripts with the same 5' start site but differing 3' ends. Analysis of the kinetics of transcript accumulation in cultures of F. diplosiphon shifted from red light to green light and vice versa shows that the cpeBA and cpeCD operons are regulated coordinately. A common 17-base-pair sequence is found upstream of the transcription start sites of both operons. A comparison of the predicted amino acid sequences of the phycoerythrin-associated linker proteins CpeC and CpeD with sequences of other previously characterized rod linker proteins shows 49 invariant residues, most of which are in the amino-terminal half of the proteins.