Chromosomal locus for cadmium resistance in Pseudomonas putida consisting of a cadmium-transporting ATPase and a MerR family response regulator

Pseudomonads from environmental sources vary widely in their sensitivity to cadmium, but the basis for this resistance is largely uncharactarized, A c hromosomal fragment encoding cadmium resistance was cloned from Pseudomonas putida 06909, a rhizosphere bacterium, and sequence analysis revealed two divergently transcribed genes, cadA and cadR, CadA was similar to cadmium-t ransporting ATPases known mostly from grampositive bacteria, and to ZntA, a lead-, zinc-, and cadmium-transporting ATPase from Escherichia coli, CadR was related to the MerR family of response regulators that normally control mercury detoxification in other bacterial systems, A related gene, zntR, r egulates zntA in E, coli, but it is not contiguous with zntA in the E, coli genome as cadA and cadR were in P, putida, In addition, unlike ZntA and ot her CadA homologs, but similar to the predicted product of gene PA3690 in t he P. aeruginosa genome, the P, putida CadA sequence had a histidine-rich N -terminal extension. CadR and the product of PA3689 of P. aeruginosa also h ad histidine-rich C-terminal extensions not found in other MerR family resp onse regulators. Mutational analysis indicated that cadA and cadR are fully responsible for cadmium resistance and partially for zinc resistance. Howe ver, unlike zntA, they did not confer significant levels of lead resistance . The cadA promoter was responsive to Cd(II), Pb(II), and Zn(II), while the cadR promoter was only induced by Cd(II), CadR apparently represses its ow n expression at the transcriptional level. However, CadR apparently does no t repress cadA. Homologs of the cadmium-transporting ATPase were detected i n many other Pseudomonas species.