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Updated: Jun 5, 2026

Light-Controlled Fermentations for Microbial Chemical and Protein Production
Published on: March 22, 2022
Light-dependent gene regulation in nonphototrophic bacteria
Montserrat Elías-Arnanz1, S Padmanabhan, Francisco J Murillo
1Departamento de Genética y Microbiología, Área de Genética (Unidad Asociada al IQFR-CSIC), Facultad de Biología, Universidad de Murcia, Murcia, Spain.
Abstract:
Bacteria sense and respond to light, a fundamental environmental factor, by employing highly evolved machineries and mechanisms. Cellular systems exist to harness light energy usefully as in phototrophic bacteria, to combat photo-oxidative damage stemming from the highly reactive species generated on absorption of light energy, and to link the light stimulus to DNA repair, taxis, development, and virulence. Recent findings on the genetic response to light in nonphototrophic bacteria highlight the ingenious transcriptional regulatory mechanisms and the panoply of factors that have evolved to perceive and transmit the signal, and to bring about finely tuned gene expression.
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