The lambda bacteriophage regulatory loop

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The long-term goal of this project is to understand the mechanism that ensures lysogeny maintenance in temperate phages yet guaranteeing efficient switch to lysis when necessary. Such understanding will be useful in order to achieve a better control of phage-induced bacterial pathogenesis. It will also be valuable for manipulation of the inducibility set-point and use of phages in gene delivery applications. We will use ¿ bacteriophage as a model system. Recent findings showed that both stable lysogeny and efficient switch to lysis in ¿ rely on DNA loop formation by the lambda repressor protein CI. CI-mediated looping represents one of the simplest transcriptional regulatory feedback mechanisms and determines the choice of developmental growth by the phage. However, a characterization of CI-mediated looping is missing. The outcome of this research will also be pivotal for both our understanding of transcriptional regulation and multi-protein-mediated regulatoryloops. We have started investigating the molecular mechanism of ¿ looping and our results show: a pivotal role of the o3 sites for the thermodynamics of loop formation, a complex kinetics for both loop formation and breakdown, an important, CI concentration-dependent role of the o3 sites in aiding loop formation up to 20 nM CI, an important, CI concentration-independent role of the o3 sites in preventing loop rupture and, finally, CI non-specific binding. Together, these observations allow the formulation of a new hypothesis about the molecular mechanism for the formation and breakdown of the ¿ regulatory loop. This hypothesis suggests: (i) a "seeding" role for the CI dimers bound at the o3 sites in the "recruitment" of more dimers which may facilitate loop formation and interfere with loop breakdown; (ii) a physiological role for non-specifically bound CI dimers and their interaction. To test this hypothesis, we propose: (1) To understand the mechanism of CI-mediated loop formation and to identify the unlooped species relevant to it. We will do this by: (i) characterizing the different, relevant unlooped species and their dependence on CI concentration (Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and Tethered Particle Microscopy(TPM)); (ii) quantifying the extent of CI non- specific binding and probing the possibility of cooperativity between non-specifically bound CI dimers (DNA pulling measurements by magnetic tweezers and theoretical modeling). (2) To elucidate the mechanism of CI-mediated loop breakdown, and characterization of the looped species relevant to it. We will do this by: (i) visualization of looped species and characterization of the dependence of their stoichiometry on time (AFM); (ii) characterization of the mechanism responsible for the time dependency of the kinetics of loop breakdown (AFM and TPM). (3) To investigate the effect of DNA supercoiling on CI-mediated looping (magnetic tweezers).