DATE2025.03.21 #Press Releases

Discovery of Genes with Easily Evolving Expression Levels in Bacteria

- Toward Predicting and Controlling Biased Biological Evolution -

Summary of presentation

A joint research team led by Team Leader Chikara Furusawa of the Laboratory for Multiscale Biosystem Dynamics at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research (BDR, RIKEN) (Professor of the Universal Biology Institute, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo) and Project Assistant Professor Saburo Tsuru of the Universal Biology Institute, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo, has comprehensively analyzed gene expression levels in E. coli obtained in evolutionary experiments. The team comprehensively analyzed the expression levels of genes and identified genes whose expression levels commonly tend to evolve in response to changes in cellular conditions caused by genetic mutations and environmental changes.

In addition to contributing to the elucidation of the mechanism of rapid evolution of expression levels, as seen in the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, this achievement is expected to be applied to the field of biotechnology through the control of biological evolution.

Organisms exhibit a wide range of phenotypic diversity, such as individual and species differences, but it is known that this diversity does not occur completely at random, but rather has a certain direction.

In this study, the joint research team succeeded in discovering genes whose expression levels tend to evolve by evolving E. coli under experimental conditions in which diverse mutations tend to accumulate and analyzing their gene expression levels. Furthermore, they found that these genes are regulated by specific regulatory proteins (transcription factors) and have a regulatory structure that is susceptible to gene mutations and environmental changes. The results of this research provide insight into the molecular mechanisms that govern the ease with which organisms evolve, and have the potential to answer the evolutionary riddle since Darwin as to why organisms tend to evolve into a particular state.

This research was published in the online edition of the scientific journal Nature Communications on March 21 (JST).

Figure: Highly expressed evolutionary genes and the transcription factors that regulate them

Related Links

RIKEN, Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST)

Journals

Journal name	Nature Communications
Title of paper	Genetic properties underlying transcriptional variability across different perturbations