The sequence in B728a that is homologous to the mgo operon is composed of genes that are orthologous to the mgo genes; theoretically, the promoter activity should have been similar to that of the wild-type strain, but it was not. This result suggests that there are additional genes that are necessary for mangotoxin production that are

not Selleckchem EGFR inhibitor present in B728a. In support of this explanation, GSK2126458 datasheet additional genes involved in mangotoxin production have been identified in UMAF0158 and cloned into a different vector than pCG2-6 [15]. The initial sequence analysis did not show any identity with the genome of B728a, and thus these additional genes may influence mgo promoter activity. Finally, the functional promoter of the mgo operon was established by locating the start of the mgo transcript (Figure 4), which is located 18 nucleotides after the putative -10 box of the second promoter analysed in silico. Thus, the first putative promoter was eliminated as a functional promoter of the mgo operon. Once the +1 site was established, it was possible to locate additional -35 and -10 boxes, which were typical of sigma70 dependent promoters of Pseudomonas spp [19, INK 128 molecular weight 20] and were more closely related than the predicted -35 and -10 boxes by BPROM software developed for Escherichia coli, which are less accurate in the search for promoters of Pseudomonas spp. These

results allowed us to determine the functional promoter of the mgo operon. The mgo operon terminator was found in a similar manner. The in silico analysis of the sequence identified two possible terminator sequences between the

3′-end of mgoD and the 5′-end of from the 5S rRNA, both of which exhibited secondary structures typical of transcription terminators. We considered that the ribosomal transcript terminator is also likely present in the analysed sequence. RT-PCR was used to clarify which was the operon terminator, establishing T1 as the functional terminator of the mgo operon. This is a typical terminator with a stable hairpin having many GC pairs followed by a string of T’s. So, it seems that the T1 terminator is a bifunctional terminator, serving this DNA region to terminate transcription of mgo operon in the sense strand and of the ribosomal operon in the antisense strand (Figure 5). The results described above are sufficient to suggest that mgoBCAD is a transcriptional unit and therefore propose that mgo is an operon. If this argument is correct, mutations in each mgo gene should lead to the absence of a transcript for the downstream genes. A polar effect was demonstrated for UMAF0158::mgoC but not UMAF0158::mgoB. The mutation in mgoB did not prevent the transcription of the downstream genes, although the hybridisation experiments revealed that the transcription appeared to be less efficient. This reduction in transcription corresponds to the reduced production of mangotoxin by UMAF0158::mgoB relative to the wild-type strain.