PHAGE COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS AS MOLECULAR TOOLS FOR CONTROLLING GENE EXPRESSION

In a recent study, we showed that bacteriophages (phages) can coordinate their infection using peptide-based communication. The system that confers this ability is named the Arbitrium system, and it utilizes a short peptide as the communication molecule. The arbitrium peptide binds and inhibits its intracellular receptor, AimR, which is a transcription factor that activates a specific phage promoter. We further showed that different phages encode different peptide-receptor combinations.

Here we show that the Arbitrium system can be used as a diverse molecular tool to control engineered gene expression in bacteria. We used fluorescent proteins as reporter genes for three different Arbitrium systems controlled by different mature peptides. The fluorescent gene is located downstream to the Arbitrium system and its expression is affected by AimR DNA binding state. We were able to control the fluorescent signal with the addition of different concentrations of the mature synthesized peptides, for bacteria harboring a single system as well as bacteria harboring several. Our data show that the Arbitrium system has the potential to be used as a tool for controlling gene expression, with the advantage of having multiple control elements with similar activity, and the ability to control several genes at the same time by external peptides.