Discovery notes

A strain-variable bacteriocin in Bacillus anthracis and Bacillus cereus with repeated Cys-Xaa-Xaa motifs

Daniel H Haft

The J. Craig Venter Institute, 9704 Medical Center Drive, Rockville, MD 20850, USA

author email corresponding author email

Biology Direct 2009, 4:15doi:10.1186/1745-6150-4-15

Published:	21 April 2009

Abstract

Bacteriocins are peptide antibiotics from ribosomally translated precursors, produced by bacteria often through extensive post-translational modification. Minimal sequence conservation, short gene lengths, and low complexity sequence can hinder bacteriocin identification, even during gene calling, so they are often discovered by proximity to accessory genes encoding maturation, immunity, and export functions. This work reports a new subfamily of putative thiazole-containing heterocyclic bacteriocins. It appears universal in all strains of Bacillus anthracis and B. cereus, but has gone unrecognized because it is always encoded far from its maturation protein operon. Patterns of insertions and deletions among twenty-four variants suggest a repeating functional unit of Cys-Xaa-Xaa.

Reviewers

This article was reviewed by Andrei Osterman and Lakshminarayan Iyer.