unveiling the role of dps in the organization of mycobacterial nucleoid揭幕dps在分枝杆菌类核的组织.pdfVIP

Unveiling the Role of Dps in the Organization of Mycobacterial Nucleoid 1 1,2 1 1 Payel Ghatak , Kajari Karmakar , Sanjay Kasetty , Dipankar Chatterji * 1 Molecular Biophysics Unit, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, 2 Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, Basel, Switzerland Abstract In order to preserve genetic information in stress conditions, bacterial DNA is organized into higher order nucleoid structure. In this paper, with the help of Atomic Force Microscopy, we show the different structural changes in mycobacterial nucleoid at different points of growth in the presence of different concentrations of glucose in the medium. We also observe that in Mycobacterium smegmatis, two different Dps proteins (Dps1 and Dps2) promote two types of nucleoid organizations. At the late stationary phase, under low glucose availability, Dps1 binds to DNA to form a very stable toroid structure. On the other hand, under the same condition, Dps2-DNA complex forms an incompletely condensed toroid and finally forms a further stable coral reef structure in the presence of RNA. This coral reef structure is stable in high concentration of bivalent ion like Mg2+. Citation: Ghatak P, Karmakar K, Kasetty S, Chatterji D (2011) Unveiling the Role of Dps in the Organization of Mycobacterial Nucleoid. PLoS ONE 6(1): e16019. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016019 Editor: Niyaz Ahmed, University of Hyderabad, India Received September 13, 2010; Accepted December 3, 2010; Published January 24, 2011 Copyright: 2011 Ghatak et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unres