We would like to thank Joost van Soest and Merle Eijkhof for thei

We would like to thank Joost van Soest and Merle Eijkhof for their technical assistance. We are grateful to the Tsien lab (University of California, San Diego) for obtaining pRSET-B-mCherry and Ole Nybroe for providing pBK-miniTn7. S.d.W. and G.V.B. contributed equally to this work. “
“A blastp search

has shown the presence learn more of a gene homologous to an alternative thymidylate synthase (TS), thyX, in Corynebacterium glutamicum ATCC 13032. To determine if thyX is functionally analogous to thyA, thyX was cloned in a plasmid and the resulting construct was transferred by transformation into a thyA mutant of Escherichia coli. The ThyX from C. glutamicum compensated for the defect in TS-deficient E. coli. A functional knockout of the thyX gene was constructed by allelic replacement using a sucrose counter-selectable suicide plasmid and confirmed by PCR and reverse transcriptase-PCR analyses. This mutant was viable without thymidine supplementation, suggesting that thyX is not an essential gene in C. glutamicum. Growth of the thyX mutant was dependent upon coupling activity of dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR) with ThyA for the synthesis of thymidine, and thus showed sensitivity to the inhibition of DHFR by the experimental

inhibitor, WR99210. This indicates that thymidine synthesis was at least partially dependent on thyX expression. As it approached stationary phase, the thyX mutant lost viability much more rapidly than the parental wild type find protocol and the mutant complemented the thyX gene, suggesting that the activity of the ThyX enzyme is important in that phase of the growth cycle. One-carbon units required for the synthesis of thymidine, histidine and methionine are generated by a reaction cycle in which dihydrofolate (DHF) is reduced to tetrahydrofolate (THF) by dihydrofolate reductase 3-mercaptopyruvate sulfurtransferase (DHFR; EC 1.5.1.3). This enzyme acts in concert with two others, thymidylate synthase (TS; EC 2.1.1.45) and serine hydroxymethyl transferase (SHMT; EC 2.1.2.1), to supply the methyl group required to convert deoxyuridylate into thymidylate (Carreras & Santi, 1995). It has been

recognized recently that the coupled reaction of DHFR with TS for the synthesis of thymidine is not ubiquitous across organisms. Many Eubacteria, many Archaebacteria and several viruses utilize an alternative pathway in which thymidine synthesis is dependent on a completely unrelated enzyme, ThyX (EC 2.1.1.148) (Giladi et al., 2002; Myllykallio et al., 2002, 2003; Leduc et al., 2003; Graziani et al., 2004; Liu & Yang, 2004; Griffin et al., 2005; Sampathkumar et al., 2005; Zhong et al., 2006; Leduc et al., 2007; Koehn et al., 2009). Corynebacterium glutamicum belongs to the mycolic acid-containing Actinomycetales group (Hecht & Causey, 1976; Stackebrandt et al., 1997). The Corynebacterium/Mycobacterium/Nocardia (CMN) group of Gram-positive bacteria has a type IV cell wall (containing meso-diaminopimelic acid, with major amounts of arabinose and galactose).

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