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Journal of Bacteriology, August 1999, p. 4955-4960, Vol. 181, No. 16
Department of Microbiology and Immunology,
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Received 3 March 1999/Accepted 9 June 1999
The stoichiometry of the structural proteins of the photosynthetic
apparatus in purple photosynthetic bacteria is achieved primarily by
complex regulation of the levels of mRNA encoding the different
proteins, which has been studied in the greatest detail in the
puf operon. Here we investigated the transcriptional and
posttranscriptional regulation of the puc operon, which
encodes the peripheral light harvesting complex LHII. We show that,
analogous to the puf operon, a primary transcript encoding
five puc genes is rapidly processed to generate more stable
RNA subspecies. Contrary to previous hypotheses, translational coupling
and regulation of puc transcription by puc gene
products were found not to occur. A putative RNA stem-loop structure
appears to attenuate transcription initiated at the puc
operon major promoter. We also found that a minor
pucD-internal promoter contributes to the levels of a message that encodes the LHII 14-kDa
0021-9193/99/$04.00+0
Copyright © 1999, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.
Transcript Cleavage, Attenuation, and an Internal
Promoter in the Rhodobacter capsulatus puc Operon
(PucE) protein.
*
Corresponding author. Present address: Whitehead
Institute for Biomedical Research, 9 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA
02142. Phone: (617) 258-5242. Fax: (617) 258-9872. E-mail:
leblanc{at}wi.mit.edu.
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