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The ferric iron uptake regulator (Fur) from the extreme acidophile Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans

¹ Laboratory of Bioinformatics and Genome Biology, University of Andrés Bello, Santiago, Chile
² Millennium Institute of Fundamental and Applied Biology, Santiago, Chile
³ Program of Cellular and Molecular Biology, ICBM, Faculty of Medicine, University of Chile, Santiago, Chile

Correspondence
D. S. Holmes
dsholmes2000{at}yahoo.com

Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans is a Gram-negative bacterium that lives at pH 2 in high concentrations of soluble ferrous and ferric iron, making it an interesting model for understanding the biological mechanisms of bacterial iron uptake and homeostasis in extremely acid conditions. A candidate fur_AF (Ferric Uptake Regulator) gene was identified in the A. ferrooxidans ATCC 23270 genome. Fur_AF has significant sequence similarity, including conservation of functional motifs, to known Fur orthologues and exhibits cross-reactivity to Escherichia coli Fur antiserum. The fur_AF gene is able to complement fur deficiency in E. coli in an iron-responsive manner. Fur_AF is also able to bind specifically to E. coli Fur regulatory regions (Fur boxes) and to a candidate Fur box from A. ferrooxidans, as judged by electrophoretic mobility shift assays. Fur_AF represses gene expression from E. coli Fur-responsive promoters fiu and fhuF when expressed at high protein levels. However, it increases gene expression from these promoters at low concentrations and possibly from other Fur-regulated promoters involved in iron-responsive oxidative stress responses.

The GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ accession number for the sequence reported in this paper is AY465905.

A comparison of the predicted amino acid sequence of A. ferrooxidans Fur_AF with that of other micro-organisms, revealing the conservation of several motifs and structural features typical of the Fur family, is available with Supplementary Fig. S1 with the online version of this paper at http://mic.sgmjournals.org.

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