June 19, 2013 –
Bioengineering professor Adam Arkin and collaborators have new findings which suggest that bacteria in the laboratory show little adaptive gene regulation in response to their environment.
It has been accepted in microbiology that in response to environmental changes, bacterial genes will boost production of needed proteins and decrease production of those that aren’t. Arkin and his colleagues found that in the laboratory, most bacterial genes appear to be regulated by signals unrelated to their function.
Arkin is the corresponding author along with Morgan Price, of Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s Physical Biosciences Division, of a paper describing this research in the journal Molecular Systems Biology. The paper is titled “Indirect and suboptimal control of gene expression is widespread in bacteria.” Other co-authors were Adam Deutschbauer, Jeffrey Skerker, Kelly Wetmore, Troy Ruths, Jordan Mar, Jennifer Kuehl and Wenjun Shao.
Read more at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.