Sticky decisions: The multilayered regulation of adhesin production by bacteria
Fig 2
Conservation of proteins involved in holdfast regulation via HfiA in C. crescentus among several Alphaproteobacteria bearing a polar adhesin.
Several species reported in the literature as bearing a polar adhesin have been selected to build this phylogenetic tree: Caulobacter crescentus [23] and C. henricii [45], Brevundimonas subvibrioides [45], Asticcacaulis excentricus [23] and A. biprosthecum [46], Hyphomonas adhaerens [47], Hirschia baltica [26], Maricaulis maris [45], Agrobacterium tumefaciens [48], Rhizobium leguminosarum [39], Sinorhizobium meliloti [49], Rhodospeudomonas palustris [27], Bradyrhizobium japonicum [50], Phaeobacter inhibens [29] and Sagittula stellata [30]. The tree was built using a concatenated alignment of 7 conserved proteins (FusA, GyrA, GyrB, RecA, RpoA, and RpoB) aligned using MUSCLE [51] and constructed using iTOL [52]. Red, orange et yellow boxes represent the presence of a polar adhesin (holdfast, UPP, or other respectively). The presence of homologous proteins was determined by BLAST [53] reciprocal best hits, with cut-offs of E value > 10−5 and sequence identity > 50%. The presence of homologs for the HfsE-D holdfast cluster, HfsJ, HfiA, RtrA, RtrB, RtrC, and SpdS / SdpR is represented by a colored box. The absence of the box indicates that no protein satisfied the BLAST criteria.