Back

Response of Escherichia coli chemotaxis pathway to pyrimidine deoxyribonucleosides

Shah, M.; Sourjik, V.

2025-04-13 microbiology
10.1101/2025.04.13.648572 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Nucleosides are essential components of all living cells. Bacteria use salvage pathways to import nucleosides from their environment and to utilize them for nucleic acid biosynthesis, but also as alternative sources of carbon, nitrogen and energy. Motile bacteria commonly show chemoattraction towards nutritionally valuable compounds, and in this work, we demonstrate that the chemotaxis pathway of Escherichia coli exhibits specific attractant response to pyrimidine nucleosides. Particularly sensitive response, in the sub-micromolar range, was observed for deoxyribonucleosides thymidine and deoxycytidine. In contrast, ribonucleosides elicited weaker and less sensitive response, and no response to pyrimidine nucleobases was observed in the micromolar range of concentrations. Our subsequent analysis revealed that the pathway response to pyrimidine deoxyribonucleosides is mediated by the minor E. coli chemoreceptor Tap. The observed narrow dynamic range of this response indicates that sensing of deoxyribonucleosides is indirect, likely via an unknown periplasmic binding protein that interacts with Tap.

Published in Microbiology Spectrum (predicted rank #5) · training set

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.