The survival and propagation of bacteria depend on their abilities to promptly respond and adapt to the changing environment. Upon encountering host environments, pathogenic bacteria face tremendous challenges, including temperature shift, nutrient availability, host defence mechanisms, competition from commensal microorganisms, etc. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a versatile opportunistic pathogen that causes various acute and chronic infections in human. The bacterium harbours an arsenal of virulence factors, enabling its colonization, dissemination and persistence. For instance, P. aeruginosa utilizes type III secretion system (T3SS) to directly inject effector proteins into host cells, leading to cell malfunction or death. A regulatory gene pvrA (PA2957, Pseudomonas virulence regulator A) was found to contribute to the bacterial virulence. PvrA coordinately regulates the genes involved in PC and long-chain fatty acid catabolism. The Pseudomonas aeruginosa regulator PvrA binds cooperatively to multiple pseudo-palindromic sites to efficiently stimulate target gene expression. Here you can see a recent cryoEM structure of the PvrA protein in complex with a synthetic DNA molecule (PDB code: 7XAQ)

#molecularart ... #immolecular ... #pseudomonas ... #transcription ... #factor ... #geneexpression ... #regulation ... #pathogenesis ... #cryoem

Structure rendered with @proteinimaging and depicted @corelphotopaint