Lanes 5–9 contain samples of eluates 1–5 eluted by buffer containing 500 mM imidazole. His10-SgcR3 protein from the eluate 5 was used in EMSA analysis. The molecular masses (kDa) of the protein markers (TransGen Biotech, Beijing, CN) are indicated. B, EMSA analysis of His10-SgcR3 with upstream region

of sgcA1, sgcB1, sgcC1, sgcD2, sgcK, cagA, sgcR3 and sgcR1R2. Each of the NVP-BSK805 clinical trial lanes contains 20 fmol of fluorescently labeled Erismodegib order promoter region DNA fragment. Lanes 2 also contain 13.5 pmol of purified recombinant His10-SgcR3 protein. C, EMSA analysis of His10-SgcR3 with sgcR1R2 promoter region. Each of the lanes contains 20 fmol of fluorescently labeled sgcR1R2 promoter region DNA fragment. Lanes 2–6 also contain 0.5 pmol, 3.12 pmol, 6.25 pmol, 13.5 pmol and 27 pmol of purified recombinant His10-SgcR3 protein, respectively. Lane 7 contains 6.25 pmol His10-SgcR3 and 200 fold excess unlabeled sgcR1R2 promoter region DNA fragment. To be a transcriptional activator of C-1027 biosynthesis, SgcR3 was speculated that

it may act as a positive regulator by binding at or near the promoter region of biosynthetic genes or regulatory genes and thereby activating their transcription. EMSA were carried out to verify whether SgcR3 indeed had DNA-binding activity, using the purified His10-tagged SgcR3 and selected CP 690550 DNA fragments from the biosynthetic gene cluster of C-1027. Eight intergenic regions of interest are chosen for EMSA, including upstream region of sgcA1, sgcB1, sgcC1, sgcD2, sgcK, cagA, sgcR3

and sgcR1R2 (Fig. 7B). The results showed that the recombinant SgcR3 protein had binding activity to the 455 bp upstream fragment of the sgcR1R2, but not for any other of the eight DNA fragments investigated. Further EMSA carried out using different concentration of purified recombinant SgcR3 showed that the shift band emerged along with the increase of the protein amount. Shifting of the labelled probe was not observed when the corresponding unlabelled probes were added in excess to binding reaction (Fig. 7C). Specific binding of SgcR3 to the upstream fragment of the sgcR1R2 in vitro, together with the results of gene Reverse transcriptase expression analysis and sgcR1R2 cross-complementation in R3KO mutant, indicated that SgcR3 activates the transcription sgcR1R2 directly by binding to its promoter region. Discussion The original sequence analysis of the C-1027 biosynthetic gene cluster identified several ORFs whose gene products may have a potential regulatory function [25]. We focused our initial study on the sgcR3 gene situated at the right end of the cluster. Overexpression studies with additional copies of sgcR3 expressed under the control of its native promoter in wild type strain indicated a positive effect on C-1027 production.