The dependence of quorum sensing in Serratia marcescens JG on the transcription of luxS gene
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The dependence of quorum sensing in Serratia marcescens JG on the transcription of luxS gene Shu‑Jing Sun · Yu‑Chen Liu · Jiao Sun · Hu Zhu
Received: 2 November 2014 / Revised: 16 December 2014 / Accepted: 26 February 2015 © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015
Abstract Bacteria communicate with one another using chemical signal molecules. This phenomenon termed quorum sensing enables the bacteria to monitor the environment for other bacteria and to alter behavior on a population-wide scale in response to cell density. Serratia marcescens JG, a quorum sensing bacterium, can secrete a furanosyl borate diester autoinducer (AI-2) in the exponential phase of growth. In this study, to further investigate the regulation of AI-2 production in S. marcescens JG, the pfs and luxS promoter fusions to an operon luxCDABE reporter were constructed in a low-copy-number vector pBR322K, which allows an examination of transcription of the genes in the pathway for signal synthesis. The results show that the luxS expression is constitutive, and the transcription of luxS is tightly correlated with AI-2 production in S. marcescens JG because the peaks of AI-2 production and transcriptional level of luxS appear at the same time point. The close relation of the profiles of luxS transcription and AI-2 production was also confirmed with real-time PCR technology. These results support the hypothesis that the quorum sensing in S. marcescens JG is luxS dependent. Communicated by Jorge Membrillo-Hernández. S.‑J. Sun College of Life Sciences, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou 350002, People’s Republic of China Y.‑C. Liu · J. Sun · H. Zhu (*) Centre for Bioengineering and Biotechnology, China University of Petroleum (East China), Qingdao 266580, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected] H. Zhu College of Plant Protection, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou 350002, People’s Republic of China
Keywords Serratia marcescens JG · luxS gene · pfs gene · Quorum sensing · Transcription
Introduction Quorum sensing (QS) is a system of stimulus and response correlated with population density. Many species of bacteria use QS to coordinate gene expression according to the density of their local population (Miller and Bassler 2001; Marshall 2013). QS systems that have been widely identified in bacteria play important roles in the regulation of bacterial multi-cellular behavior, by which bacteria sense population density to control various biological functions including bioluminescence (Anetzberger et al. 2009), biofilm formation (Gonzalez Barrios et al. 2006), extracellular polysaccharide level (Marketon et al. 2003), antibiotic production (McCormack 2006), swarming motility (Yang and Defoirdt 2014), virulence (Antunes et al. 2010), cell metabolism (Thomson et al. 2000; Van Houdt et al. 2006, 2007a), cell surface electrokinetic properties (Eboigbodin et al. 2006) and adaptation to changing environments (Zhu et al. 2012). Common classes of signaling molecules are N-acyl homoserine lacton
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