Relative stability of membrane proteins in Escherichia coli

Biophysical characterization of synthetic adhesins for predicting and tuning engineered living material properties

Bacterial synthetic multicellular systems are promising platforms for engineered living materials (ELMs) for medical, biosynthesis, environmental, and smart materials applications. Recent advancements in genetically encoded adhesion toolkits have enabled precise manipulation of cell-cell adhesion and the design and patterning of self-assembled multicellular materials. However, in contrast to gene regulation in synthetic biology, the characterization and control of synthetic adhesins remains limited. Here, we demonstrate the quantitative characterization of a bacterial synthetic adhesion toolbox through various biophysical methods. We determine key parameters, including number of adhesins per cell, in-membrane diffusion constant, production and decay rates, and bond-breaking force between adhesins. With these parameters, we demonstrate the bottom-up prediction and quantitative tuning of macroscopic ELM properties (tensile strength) and, furthermore, that cells inside ELMs are connected only by a small fraction of available adhesins. These results enable the rational engineering, characterization, and modeling of other synthetic and natural adhesins and multicellular consortia.

Protein degradation sets the fraction of active ribosomes at vanishing growth

Growing cells adopt common basic strategies to achieve optimal resource allocation under limited resource availability. Our current understanding of such “growth laws” neglects degradation, assuming that it occurs slowly compared to the cell cycle duration. Here we argue that this assumption cannot hold at slow growth, leading to important consequences. We propose a simple framework showing that at slow growth protein degradation is balanced by a fraction of “maintenance” ribosomes. Consequently, active ribosomes do not drop to zero at vanishing growth, but as growth rate diminishes, an increasing fraction of active ribosomes performs maintenance. Through a detailed analysis of compiled data, we show that the predictions of this model agree with data from E. coli and S. cerevisiae. Intriguingly, we also find that protein degradation increases at slow growth, which we interpret as a consequence of active waste management and/or recycling. Our results highlight protein turnover as an underrated factor for our understanding of growth laws across kingdoms.

The idea that simple quantitative relationships relate cell physiology to cellular composition dates back to the 1950s, but the recent years saw a leap in our understanding of such “growth laws”, with relevant implications regarding the interdependence between growth, metabolism and biochemical networks. However, recent works on nutrient-limited growth mainly focused on laboratory conditions that are favourable to growth. Thus, our current mathematical understanding of the growth laws neglects protein degradation, under the argument that it occurs slowly compared to the timescale of the cell cycle. Instead, at slow growth the timescales of mass loss from protein degradation and dilution become comparable. In this work, we propose that protein degradation shapes the quantitative relationships between ribosome allocation and growth rate, and determines a fraction of ribosomes that do not contribute to growth and need to remain active to balance degradation.

Overexpression of outer membrane porins in E. coli using pBluescript-derived vectors

The genes coding for four major outer membrane porins of Escherichia coli, ompF, ompC, phoE, and lamB, have been cloned into pBluescript-derived vectors and overexpressed to very high level (approximately 80% of the total membrane protein) in widely used host strains lacking one or more porins. For OmpF, OmpC, and PhoE porins it is shown that, contrary to current dogma, the genes can be overexpressed without undue deleterious effects upon cell growth and are stable, even under conditions of continuous expression. In contrast, overexpression of LamB is toxic to cell growth, but can be performed using tightly regulated lac promotor-driven expression. The vectors described allow overexpression, sequencing, and mutagenesis to be performed using a single system, without the necessity of subcloning, thus simplifying genetic manipulation. A particular advantage of these new vectors (with the exception of the vector for LamB) is that they do not require a particular regime for inducing the recombinant protein. To our knowledge, this study is the only comparative study of widely used membrane porin expression systems and the first to show that several porins can be stably expressed individually and maintained on high copy number vectors.

The identification of global patterns and unique signatures of proteins across 14 environments using outer membrane proteomics of bacteria

We test the hypothesis that organisms sourced from different environments exhibit unique fingerprints in macromolecular composition. Experimentally, we followed proteomic changes with 14 different sub-lethal environmental stimuli in Escherichia coli at controlled growth rates. The focus was on the outer membrane sub-proteome, which is known to be extremely sensitive to environmental controls. The analyses surprisingly revealed that pairs of proteins belonging to very different regulons, such as Slp and OmpX or FadL and OmpF, have the closest patterns of change with the 14 conditions. Fe-limited and cold-cultured bacteria have the most distinct global patterns of spot changes, but the patterns with fast growth and oxygen limitation are the closest amongst the 14 environments. These unexpected but statistically robust results suggest that we have an incomplete picture of bacterial regulation across different stress responses; baseline choices and growth-rate influences are probably underestimated factors in such systems-level analysis. In terms of our aim of getting a unique profile for each of the 14 investigated environments, we find that it is unnecessary to compare all the proteins in a proteome and that a panel of five proteins is sufficient for identification of environmental fingerprints. This demonstrates the future feasibility of tracing the history of contaminating bacteria in hospitals, foods or industrial settings as well as for released organisms and biosecurity purposes.

Role of Clp protease subunits in degradation of carbon starvation proteins in Escherichia coli

When deprived of a carbon source, Escherichia coli induces the synthesis of a group of carbon starvation proteins. The degradation of proteins labeled during starvation was found to be an energy-dependent process which was inhibited by the addition of KCN and accelerated when cells were resupplied with a carbon source. The degradation of the starvation proteins did not require the ATP-dependent Lon protease or the energy-independent proteases protease I, protease IV, OmpT, and DegP. During starvation, mutants lacking either the ClpA or ClpP subunit of the ATP-dependent Clp protease showed a partial reduction in the degradation of starvation proteins. Strains lacking ClpP failed to increase degradation of starvation proteins when glucose was added to starving cells. The clpP mutants showed a competitive disadvantage compared with wild-type cells when exposed to repeated cycles of carbon starvation and growth. Surprisingly, the glucose-stimulated, ClpP-dependent degradation of starvation proteins did not require either the ClpA or ClpB protein. The patterns of synthesis of starvation proteins were similar in clpP+ and clpP cells. The clpP mutants had reduced rates of degradation of certain starvation proteins in the membrane fraction when a carbon source was resupplied to the starved cells.

Proteases and protein degradation in Escherichia coli

In E. coli, protein degradation plays important roles in regulating the levels of specific proteins and in eliminating damaged or abnormal proteins. E. coli possess a very large number of proteolytic enzymes distributed in the cytoplasm, the inner membrane, and the periplasm, but, with few exceptions, the physiological functions of these proteases are not known. More than 90% of the protein degradation occurring in the cytoplasm is energy-dependent, but the activities of most E. coli proteases in vitro are not energy-dependent. Two ATP-dependent proteases, Lon and Clp, are responsible for 70-80% of the energy-dependent degradation of proteins in vivo. In vitro studies with Lon and Clp indicate that both proteases directly interact with substrates for degradation. ATP functions as an allosteric effector promoting an active conformation of the proteases, and ATP hydrolysis is required for rapid catalytic turnover of peptide bond cleavage in proteins. Lon and Clp show virtually no homology at the amino acid level, and thus it appears that at least two families of ATP-dependent proteases have evolved independently.

Protein turnover and proteolysis during sporulation of Bacillus subtilis

A two-dimensional electrophoretic method was used to show that protein degradation occurs immediately after the end of exponential growth but that its occurrence is masked in the usual assay methods for a 2-h period and that degradation is apparently nonselective with respect to protein molar mass or charge. The results suggest that considerable reutilization of internal amino acids may occur during sporulation regardless of the size of the external chase. Finally, the levels of intracellular proteinase activities present even at the end of exponential phase growth, as measured in vitro, are sufficient to account for the maximum rates of protein degradation observed in vivo.

Characterization of a membrane-associated serine protease in Escherichia coli

Three membrane-associated proteolytic activities in Escherichia coli were resolved by DEAE-cellulose chromatography from detergent extracts of the total envelope fraction. On the basis of substrate specificity for the hydrolysis of chromogenic amino acid ester substrates, the first two eluting activities were determined previously to be protease V and protease IV, respectively (M. Pacaud, J. Bacteriol. 149:6-14, 1982). The third proteolytic activity eluting from the DEAE-cellulose column was further purified by affinity chromatography on benzamidine-Sepharose 6B. We termed this enzyme protease VI. Protease VI did not hydrolyze any of the chromogenic substrates used in the detection of protease IV and protease V. However, all three enzymes generated acid-soluble fragments from a mixture of E. coli membrane proteins which were biosynthetically labeled with radioactive amino acids. The activity of protease VI was sensitive to serine protease inhibitors. Using [3H]diisopropylfluorophosphate as an active-site labeling reagent, we determined that protease VI has an apparent molecular weight of 43,000 in polyacrylamide gels. All three membrane-associated serine proteases were insensitive to inhibition by Ecotin, and endogenous, periplasmic inhibitor of trypsin.