Da. Boyd et al., Identification of the operon for the sorbitol (glucitol) phosphoenolpyruvate : sugar phosphotransferase system in Streptococcus mutans, INFEC IMMUN, 68(2), 2000, pp. 925-930
Transposon mutagenesis and marker rescue were used to isolate and identify
an 8.5-kb contiguous region containing six open reading frames constituting
the operon for the sorbitol P-enolpyruvate phosphotransferase transport sy
stem (PTS) of Streptococcus mutans LT11. The first gene, srlD, codes for so
rbitol-6-phosphate dehydrogenase, followed downstream by srlR, coding for a
transcriptional regulator; srlM, coding for a putative activator; and the
srlA, srlE, and srlB genes, coding for the EIIC, EIIBC, and EIIA components
of the sorbitol PTS, respectively. Among all sorbitol PTS operons characte
rized to date, the srlD gene is found after the genes coding for the EII co
mponents; thus, the location of the gene in S. mutans is unique. The SrlR p
rotein is similar to several transcriptional regulators found in Bacillus s
pp. that contain PTS regulator domains (J. Stulke, M. Arnaud, G. Rapoport,
and I. Martin-Verstraete, Mel. Microbiol. 28:865-874, 1998), and its gene o
verlaps the srlM gene by 1 bp. The arrangement of these two regulatory gene
s is unique, having not been reported for other bacteria.