Disease relevance of pilR

• We cloned a chimeric gene, rsp, that has sequence similarity to both the pilS and pilR genes of Pseudomonas aeruginosa encoding a two-component regulatory system that controls piliation [1].

High impact information on pilR

• Four of these mutants carry point mutations which mapped to a locus upstream of the recently identified pilS, pilR, and pilA genes [2].
• Mutations within pilR and pilA that have no polar effect were demonstrated to be responsible for pilus and social motility defects [3].
• Myxococcal pilS and pilR encode amino acid sequences with similarity to PilS and PilR of P. aeruginosa, as well as to other members of the NtrB/C family of two-component regulators [3].
• PilR was overproduced by fusing pilR to the gene for the maltose-binding protein (malE), yielding a MalE-PilR hybrid protein [4].
• The plasmid with the malE-pilR fusion, when introduced into a non-piliated pilR mutant strain of P. aeruginosa, restored piliation, indicating that the hybrid protein retains PilR function in vivo [4].

Biological context of pilR

• The identification of pilS and pilR makes possible a more thorough examination of the signal transduction systems controlling expression of virulence factors in P. aeruginosa [5].
• A probe derived from inverse polymerase chain reaction was used to isolate the corresponding wild-type sequences from a P. aeruginosa PAO cosmid reference library, and two adjacent genes affected by transposon insertions, pilS and pilR, were located and sequenced [5].

References