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A cascade of coregulating enhancer binding proteins initiates and propagates a multicellular developmental program
Edited by Emil C. Gotschlich, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY, and approved May 12, 2011 (received for review April 27, 2011)

Abstract
The signal transduction networks that initiate multicellular development in bacteria remain largely undefined. Here, we report that Myxococcus xanthus regulates entry into its multicellular developmental program using a novel strategy: a cascade of transcriptional activators known as enhancer binding proteins (EBPs). The EBPs in the cascade function in sequential stages of early development, and several lines of evidence indicate that the cascade is propagated when EBPs that function at one stage of development directly regulate transcription of an EBP gene important for the next developmental stage. We also show that the regulatory cascade is designed in a novel way that extensively expands on the typical use of EBPs: Instead of using only one EBP to regulate a particular gene or group of genes, which is the norm in other bacterial systems, the cascade uses multiple EBPs to regulate EBP genes that are positioned at key transition points in early development. Based on the locations of the putative EBP promoter binding sites, several different mechanisms of EBP coregulation are possible, including the formation of coregulating EBP transcriptional complexes. We propose that M. xanthus uses an EBP coregulation strategy to make expression of EBP genes that modulate stage-stage transitions responsive to multiple signal transduction pathways, which provide information that is important for a coordinated decision to advance the developmental process.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: agarza{at}syr.edu.
Author contributions: A.G.G. designed research; K.M.G. and N.C. performed research; G.S. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; K.M.G., N.C., and A.G.G. analyzed data; and K.M.G., D.K., and A.G.G. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
See Author Summary on page 12981.
Data deposition: The data reported in this paper have been deposited in the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo (accession no. GSE13523).
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1105876108/-/DCSupplemental.
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