A General Mechanism for Initiating the General Stress Response in Bacteria

• DOI: 10.1101/2024.02.16.580724
• Publication Date: 2024-02-18T06:10:10Z
• Authors: Rishika Baral; Kristin Ho; Ramasamy P. Kumar; Jesse B. Hopkins; Maxwell B. Watkins; Salvatore LaRussa; Suhaily Caban-Penix; Logan A. Calderone; Niels Bradshaw

The General Stress Response promotes survival of bacteria in adverse conditions, but how sensor proteins transduce species-specific signals to initiate the response is not known. serine/threonine phosphatase RsbU initiates B. subtilis upon binding a partner protein (RsbT) that released from sequestration by environmental stresses. We report RsbT activates inducing otherwise flexible linkers form short coiled-coil dimerizes and domains. Importantly, we present evidence related dimers diverse domains control other signaling across bacterial phyla. These results additionally resolve mystery shared sensory phosphatases, diguanylate cyclases histidine kinases, revealing common linker transduction mechanism. propose this provides with modularly exchangeable toolkit for evolution pathways.