Short CT-rich motifs can trigger context-specific silencing of gene expression in bacteria
We use an oligonucleotide library of over 10000 variants together with a synthetic biology approach to identify an insulation mechanism encoded within a subset of {sigma}54 promoters. Insulation manifests itself as dramatically reduced protein expression for a downstream gene that may be expressed by transcriptional read-through. The insulation we observe is strongly associated with the presence of short CT-rich motifs (3-5 bp), positioned within 25 bp upstream of the Shine-Dalgarno (SD) motif of the silenced gene. We hypothesize that insulation is effected by binding of the RBS to the upstream CT-rich motif. We provide evidence to support this hypothesis using mutations to the CT-rich motif and gene expression measurements on multiple sequence variants. Modelling is also consistent with this hypothesis. We show that the strength of the silencing, effected by insulation, depends on the location and number of CT-rich motifs encoded within the promoters. Finally, we show that in E.coli these insulator sequences are preferentially encoded within {sigma}54 promoters as compared to other promoter types, suggesting a regulatory role for these sequences in natural contexts. Our findings suggest that context-related regulatory effects may often be due to sequence-specific interactions encoded sparsely by short motifs that are not easily detected by lower throughput studies. Such short sequence-specific phenomena can be uncovered with a focused OL design that filters out the sequence noise, as exemplified herein.