Evidence that Regulatory Protein MarA of <i>Escherichia coli</i> Represses <i>rob</i> by Steric Hindrance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The MarA protein of Escherichia coli can both activate and repress the initiation of transcription, depending on the position and orientation of its degenerate 20-bp binding site ("marbox") at the promoter. For all three known repressed genes, the marbox overlaps the promoter. It has been reported that MarA represses the rob promoter via an RNA polymerase (RNAP)-DNA-MarA ternary complex. Under similar conditions, we found a ternary complex for the repressed purA promoter also. These findings, together with the backwards orientation of repressed marboxes, suggested a unique interaction of MarA with RNAP in repression. However, no repression-specific residues of MarA could be found among 38 single-alanine replacement mutations previously shown to retain activation function or among mutants from random mutagenesis. Mutations Thr12Ala, Arg36Ala, Thr95Ile, and Pro106Ala were more damaging for activation than for repression, some up to 10-fold, so these residues may play a specific role in activation. We found that nonspecific binding of RNAP to promoterless regions of DNA was presumably responsible for the ternary complexes seen previously. When RNAP binding was promoter specific, MarA reduced RNAP access to the rob promoter; there was little or no ternary complex. These findings strongly implicate steric hindrance as the mechanism of repression of rob by MarA.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".