, 1996). It is hypothesized that this transporter takes an oligosaccharide then metabolized to xylose and glucose by

YicI (Okuyama et al., 2004). We previously identified a carbohydrate metabolic operon (frz) that is highly associated with extraintestinal pathogenic E. coli (ExPEC) strains. The frz operon codes for three subunits of a phosphoenolpyruvate : carbohydrate phosphotransferase system (PTS) transporter of the fructose subfamily, for a transcriptional activator containing PRD domains (PTS regulatory domains), for two type II ketose-1,6-bisphosphate aldolases, for a sugar-specific kinase [repressor, ORF, kinase family (ROK)], and for a protein of the cupin superfamily. We proved that frz promotes bacterial fitness under stressful conditions, such as oxygen restriction, the late stationary phase of growth, or growth in serum or in the intestinal tract. Furthermore, we showed that selleck compound frz is involved in adherence to and internalization in human type II pneumocytes, human enterocytes, and chicken liver cells by favoring the ON orientation of the fim operon promoter and thus acting on the expression of type 1 fimbriae, which are the major ExPEC PLX4032 solubility dmso adhesins. Both the PRD activator, FrzR, and the metabolic enzymes encoded by the frz operon are involved in these phenotypes (Rouquet et al., 2009). As the effects of the Frz components depend

on the composition of the growth medium, it was hypothesized that the Frz system senses its environment to allow the expression of genes implicated

in type 1 fimbriae synthesis and in the protection of the bacteria from the particular environmental stresses encountered during both nutritional deprivation (late stationary phase of growth) and oxygen restriction. Microarray experiments that allowed the identification of several genes whose expression is significantly modified in the frz mutants strengthen this hypothesis (our unpublished data). Sequencing of the genomic environment of the frz operon in the ExPEC strain BEN2908 indicated that it is located between the yicH and the yicI genes of E. coli and PCR experiments showed that it is separated by only the yicI and the yicJ genes from the tRNA selC locus (Rouquet et al., 2009). An in silico crossover Thalidomide between two direct repeats identified in the intergenic regions of yicH-ORF8frz and yicI-ORF1frz allows the deletion of the frz operon from the genome of strain BEN2908 and the conservation of 53 base pairs from the intergenic regions between the yicH and the yicI genes. These 53 base pairs are alignable (58% identical nucleotides) with the yicH-yicI intergenic region of the commensal E. coli K-12 substrain MG1655 (Rouquet et al., 2009). The data described above, the fact that the G+C content of the frz operon (48.7%) is close to the G+C content (50.8%) of the entire E.