Disease relevance of traM

• The origin of transfer (oriT) of the IncFV plasmid pED208 contains a region with three binding sites for both the plasmid-encoded TraM protein and the integration host factor (IHF) of Escherichia coli, a sequence-specific DNA-binding protein [1].

High impact information on traM

• TraM is essential for F plasmid-mediated bacterial conjugation, where it binds to the plasmid DNA near the origin of transfer, and recognizes a component of the transmembrane DNA transfer complex, TraD [2].
• Comparison of TraM to its Glu88 mutants predicted to stabilize the helical structure suggests that the protonated state is the active form for binding TraD in conjugation [2].
• The gene encoding the TraM protein of the conjugative plasmid F was cloned, overexpressed and the gene product was purified [3].
• The TraM protein was found in the cytoplasm of cells carrying the F plasmid with a smaller amount in the inner membrane [3].
• Using DNA retardation assays and the DNase I footprinting technique, the TraM protein was found to bind to three large motifs in the oriT region: (I) an inverted repeat, (II) two direct repeats, and (III) the traM promoter region [4].

Biological context of traM

• The TraM protein of plasmid R1 is a DNA-binding protein [5].
• Promoter pM1 is constitutively expressed, while pM2 is much stronger but is repressed almost completely by the TraM protein and partially by integration host factor, whose binding site is near pM2 [6].
• The predicted amino acid sequence for the traM protein shows that this inner membrane protein contains no signal sequence [7].

Analytical, diagnostic and therapeutic context of traM

• Site-specific mutagenesis of the region encoding the N-terminus of the TraM protein eliminated the autoregulative effect indicating that the N-terminal amino acids of the protein are important to its DNA-binding function [8].

References