, 1990; Navasa et al., 2009). We postulated that these thermoregulatory responses are a direct consequence of expression levels of genes that are

implicated in the synthesis and/or regulation of these CPSs. Accordingly, we investigated the effect of growth temperature of E. coli K92 (19 and 37 °C) on the transcription level of genes (analysed by real-time selleck chemicals llc PCR) related to the metabolism of sialic acid, PA and CA. The results reveal, for the first time, a direct relationship between a metabolic effect of growth temperature and gene expression on E. coli K92 capsular biosynthesis. Escherichia coli K92 (ATCC 35860) was obtained from the American Type Culture Collection. Bacteria were maintained on trypticase soy agar and slants were grown at 37 °C for seeding liquid media. Five millilitres of sterile saline solution was added to the slant and the bacterial suspension was adjusted to A540 nm=1.0. Each 250-mL Erlenmeyer flask containing 62.5 mL of the required medium was seeded with 1.0 mL of this bacterial suspension. Incubations

were carried out at the required SRT1720 research buy temperature with aeration (250 r.p.m.). Defined liquid medium (MM Xil-Asn) (González-Clemente et al., 1990) containing a basal composition (per litre) of 1.0 g NaCl, 1.0 g K2SO4, 0.2 g MgSO4·7H2O, 0.02 g CaCl2·6H2O, 0.001 g FeSO4·7H2O, 0.001 g CuSO4·5H2O, 10.8 g NaH2PO4, 0.5 g KH2PO4, Xyl (8.4 g L−1) as carbon source and Asn (11.3 g L−1) as nitrogen enough source (Sigma Chemical Co., St. Louis, MO). Overnight cultures of E. coli K92 incubated at 37 or 19 °C in MM Xil-Asn medium were subinoculated into fresh broth at 5% v/v and regrown. Cells were collected in the mid-exponential phase (OD540 nm=3) at both temperatures (Navasa et al., 2009). Purification of total RNA was performed using an Ilustra RNAspin Mini RNA Isolation

Kit (GE Healthcare), according to the manufacturer’s instructions. The isolated total RNA was treated with DNase I (Invitrogen S.A.) and quantified using a NanoDrop ND-1000 spectrophotometer (NanoDrop), where an A260 nm of 1.0 equals 40 μg mL−1. An aliquot containing 50 ng of RNA was reverse-transcribed with the ThermoScript RT-PCR System (Invitrogen S.A.) following the manufacturer’s instructions using specific primers that were designed using the software oligo primer analysis software (Rychlik, 2007) based on sequences retrieved from the GenBank/EMBL databases (Table 1). The optimized reaction condition was one cycle of 50 °C for 2 min, followed by one cycle of 95 °C for 5 min and 35 cycles of 15 s at 95 °C and 60 s at 60 °C. Reverse-transcribed RNA samples were quantified using SYBR Green PCR Master Mix (Applied Biosystems) on an ABI Prism 7000 Sequence Detection System thermocycler (Applied Biosystems). Relative amounts of cDNA were calculated using ABI Prism 7000 SDS software (Applied Biosystems) providing cycle threshold (CT) values.