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The new group of non-pathogenic plant-associated nitrogen-fixing Burkholderia spp. shares a conserved quorum-sensing system, which is tightly regulated by the RsaL repressor

¹ Bacteriology Group, International Centre for Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology, Trieste, Italy
² Centro de Ciencias Genómicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ap. Postal 565-A, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico

Correspondence
Vittorio Venturi
venturi{at}icgeb.org

A novel group of nitrogen-fixing plant-associated Burkholderia species has emerged in the last few years. The purpose of this investigation was to determine if these species possess an N-acylhomoserine lactone (AHL) quorum-sensing (QS) cell–cell signalling system, and whether it is important for nitrogen fixation and other phenotypic features in Burkholderia kururiensis. It was determined that B. kururiensis, and other members of this Burkholderia species cluster, contain at least one highly conserved system, designated BraI/R, which produces and responds to N-dodecanoyl-3-oxo-homoserine lactone (C12-3-oxo-AHL). The BraI/R AHL QS is not involved in the regulation of nitrogen fixation or in several other important phenotypes, indicating that it may not be a global regulatory system. The BraI/R system is similar to LasI/R of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and, as with lasI/R, there is a repressor gene, rsaL, between the braI/R genes. B. kururiensis normally synthesizes very low levels of C12-3-oxo-AHL, but the situation dramatically changes when RsaL is missing since an rsaL mutant displays a marked increase in AHL production. This unique stringent regulation indicates that RsaL could be an on/off switch for AHL QS in B. kururiensis and the ability to produce very high levels of AHL also questions the role of this molecule in the novel group of Burkholderia. The presence of a well-conserved and distinct AHL QS system among all the diazotrophic Burkholderia is a further indication that they are closely related, and that this system might play an important and conserved role in the lifestyle of this novel group of bacterial species.

The GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ accession number for the nucleotide sequence of the 4938 bp XmnI fragment harbouring braI, rsaL and braR is AM940944.