The Evolution of Two-Component Signal Transduction Systems

By Emily J. Capra, M. Laub. Annual Review of Microbiology, 2012

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To exist in a wide range of environmental niches, bacteria must sense and respond to a myriad of external signals. A primary means by which this occurs is through two-component signal transduction pathways, typically comprised of a histidine kinase that receives the input stimuli and a response regulator that effects an appropriate change in cellular physiology. Histidine kinases and response regulators have an intrinsic modularity that separates signal input, phosphotransfer, and output response; this modularity has allowed bacteria to dramatically expand and diversify their signaling capabilities. Recent work has begun to reveal the molecular basis by which two-component proteins evolve. How and why do orthologous signaling proteins diverge? How do cells gain new pathways and recognize new signals? What changes are needed to insulate a new pathway from existing pathways? What constraints are there on gene duplication and lateral gene transfer? Here, we review progress made in answering these questions, highlighting how the integration of genome sequence data with experimental studies is providing major new insights.

Subfields: Ecology, Genetics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc4462f68dbbedcbf6ec628a5822be40b6e1bf62

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Citations in the corpus

Microbial Surface Colonization and Biofilm Development in Marine Environments (2015, background): “The biological pump provides one of the biological mechanisms contributing to the oceanic sink of atmospheric CO2 via the settlement of biogenic organic particles out of the ocean surface waters. microbial carbon pump The process of microbial transformation of labile dissolved organic carbon to reca”
Evolutionary resurrection of flagellar motility via rewiring of the nitrogen regulation system (2015, background): “Due to past cycles of gene duplication, divergence and horizontal genetic 23 transfer, there is often extensive homology between the components of different 24 pathways (4), raising the possibility of cross-talk or redundancy between pathways (5).”
Connecting the Sequence-Space of Bacterial Signaling Proteins to Phenotypes Using Coevolutionary Landscapes (2016, background): “An important example is two-component signaling (TCS) (Hoch 2000; Stock et al. 2000; Laub and Goulian 2007; Casino et al. 2010; Szurmant and Hoch 2010; Capra and Laub 2012), which serves as the primary means for bacteria to sense the environment and carry out appropriate responses.”