The use of gene fusions of study bacterial transport proteins

The transport of solutes by bacteria has been studied for about thirty years. Early experiments on amino acid entry and galactoside accumulation provided concrete evidence that bacteria possessed specific transport systems and that these were subject to regulation. Since than a large number of transport systems have been discovered and studied extensively. Many of these use entirely different strategies for capturing or accumulating substrates. This diversity reflects variation in the availability of nutrients an ions in the different environments tolerated and inhabited by microorganisms. Examination of a few bacterial transport systems provides an opportunity to gain insight into a wide range of topics in the area of membrane transport. These include: the identification of carrier proteins and their arrangement in the membrane, the regulation of transport protein synthesis by environmental factors, and the localization of transport proteins to their extracytoplasmic destinations. It has been possible to construct a number of bacterial strains in which the gene (lacZ) which codes for the cytoplasmic enzyme beta-galactosidase is fused to genes which code for transport proteins. The following article is intended to illustrate how these gene fusions have been used to study the regulation and structure of transport proteins in Escherichia coli.