Computational Exploration of Putative LuxR Solos in Archaea and Their Functional Implications in Quorum Sensing

• Main Authors: Akanksha Rajput, Manoj Kumar
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2017-05-01
• Series: Frontiers in Microbiology
• Subjects: Archaea; quorum-sensing; LuxR solos; ligand-binding; phylogeny; ecological niche
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fmicb.2017.00798/full

LuxR solos are unexplored in Archaea, despite their vital role in the bacterial regulatory network. They assist bacteria in perceiving acyl homoserine lactones (AHLs) and/or non-AHLs signaling molecules for establishing intraspecies, interspecies, and interkingdom communication. In this study, we explored the potential LuxR solos of Archaea from InterPro v62.0 meta-database employing taxonomic, probable function, distribution, and evolutionary aspects to decipher their role in quorum sensing (QS). Our bioinformatics analyses showed that putative LuxR solos of Archaea shared few conserved domains with bacterial LuxR despite having less similarity within proteins. Functional characterization revealed their ability to bind various AHLs and/or non-AHLs signaling molecules that involve in QS cascades alike bacteria. Further, the phylogenetic study indicates that Archaeal LuxR solos (with less substitution per site) evolved divergently from bacteria and share distant homology along with instances of horizontal gene transfer. Moreover, Archaea possessing putative LuxR solos, exhibit the correlation between taxonomy and ecological niche despite being the inhabitant of diverse habitats like halophilic, thermophilic, barophilic, methanogenic, and chemolithotrophic. Therefore, this study would shed light in deciphering the role of the putative LuxR solos of Archaea to adapt varied habitats via multilevel communication with other organisms using QS.