Physiological and Transcriptomic Analyses to Characterize the Function of Fur and Iron Response in Shewanella oneidensis

Abstract

Maintaining iron homeostasis is a key metabolic challenge for most organisms. In many bacterial species, regulation of iron homeostasis is carried out by the global transcriptional regulator Fur. Physiological examination showed that Shewanella oneidensis harboring a fur deletion mutation had deficiencies in both growth and acid tolerance response. However, the fur mutant better tolerated iron-limited environments than the wild-type strain MR-1. Transcriptomic studies comparing the fur mutant and MR-1 confirmed previous findings that iron acquisition systems were highly induced by Fur inactivation. In addition, the temporal gene expression profiling of the fur mutant in response to iron depletion and repletion suggested that a number of genes involved in energy transport were iron-responsive but Fur-independent. Further identification of Fur-independent genes was obtained by generating a gene co-expression network from temporal gene expression profiles. A group of genes is involved in heat shock and has an rpoH-binding site at their promoters, and genes related to anaerobic energy transport has a highly conserved Crp binding site at the promoters. Together, this work provides useful information for the characterization of the function of Fur and the iron response in S. oneidensis.