A novel gene that interferes with the phosphotransfer signal transduction mediated by the EnvZ osmosensor in Escherichia coli.

In Escherichia coli, expression of the major outer membrane proteins, OmpC and OmpF, is regulated in response to the medium osmolarity and other environmental stimuli. A two-component signal transduction system, mediated by EnvZ and OmpR, is crucially responsible for this osmotic regulation of the ompC and ompF genes. In this study, an E. coli gene was cloned, which interferes with expression of both the ompC and ompF genes at the level of transcription, provided that the cloned gene was introduced in E. coli cells by a multicopy plasmid. The gene product was identified as F107, which was previously characterized as a hypothetical protein in E. coli genome databases. F107 containing 107 amino acids appears to be highly hydrophobic, and has a sequence similarity to the eukaryotic type of cytochrome-c oxidase subunit III. The mechanism by which F107 inhibits transcription of ompC and ompF was examined extensively, mainly by using a set of envZ and ompR mutants. These results suggested that F107 interferes specifically with a function of the EnvZ osmosensory kinase. Possible mechanisms by which F107 affects the EnvZ function are discussed.