Sugar transport by the bacterial phosphotransferase system. In vivo regulation of lactose transport in Escherichia coli by IIIGlc, a protein of the phosphoenolpyruvate:glycose phosphotransferase system.

Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium preferentially utilize sugar substrates of the phosphoenol-pyruvate:glycose phosphotransferase system (PTS) when the growth medium also contains other sugars. This phenomenon, diauxic growth, is regulated by the crr gene, which encodes the PTS protein IIIGlc (Saffen, D.W., Presper, K.A., Doering, T.L., and Roseman, S. (1987) J. Biol. Chem. 16241-16253). We have proposed that non-PTS permeases are regulated by their interaction with IIIGlc, and in vitro studies from other laboratories have provided support for this model, but the in vivo effects of excess IIIGlc are not known. In the present studies, transformed cells that overproduced IIIGlc 2- and 10-fold, respectively, were constructed from a pts+ strain of E. coli and plasmids containing the crr gene. In the 2-fold overproducer, fermentation of, and growth on the non-PTS carbohydrates glycerol, lactose, maltose, and melibiose was generally more sensitive to the glucose analogue methyl-alpha-D-glucopyranoside than in a control strain containing normal levels of IIIGlc. In addition, inhibition of lactose permease activity by methyl-alpha-glucoside (inducer exclusion) was more effective in the 2-fold overproducer than in the control strain, particularly when the permease activity was high. The 10-fold IIIGlc overproducing strain had a requirement for the amino acids methionine, isoleucine, leucine, and valine that may or may not be related to the increased concentration of IIIGlc. Fermentation of non-PTS carbohydrates was also poor in the latter strain. Finally, lactose permease activity was 50% of that in control cells containing the same levels of beta-galactosidase, and the lactose permease activity in the IIIGlc overproducer was reduced to an extremely low level in the presence of methyl alpha-glucoside. Thus there is an inverse relationship between the cellular concentration of IIIGlc and the ability to metabolize non-PTS substrates. The results are consistent with the model where inducer exclusion is affected by a direct interaction between IIIGlc and a non-PTS transport system.