Unraveling the Complex Interplay of Fis and IHF Through Synthetic Promoter Engineering

Bacterial promoters are usually formed by multiple cis-regulatory elements recognized by a plethora of transcriptional factors (TFs). From those, global regulators are key elements since these TFs are responsible for the regulation of hundreds of genes in the bacterial genome. For instance, Fis and IHF are global regulators that play a major role in gene expression control in Escherichia coli, and usually, multiple cis-regulatory elements for these proteins are present at target promoters. Here, we investigated the relationship between the architecture of the cis-regulatory elements for Fis and IHF in E. coli. For this, we analyze 42 synthetic promoter variants harboring consensus cis-elements for Fis and IHF at different distances from the core −35/−10 region and in various numbers and combinations. We first demonstrated that although Fis preferentially recognizes its consensus cis-element, it can also recognize, to some extent, the consensus-binding site for IHF, and the same was true for IHF, which was also able to recognize Fis binding sites. However, changing the arrangement of the cis-elements (i.e., the position or number of sites) can completely abolish the non-specific binding of both TFs. More remarkably, we demonstrated that combining cis-elements for both TFs could result in Fis and IHF repressed or activated promoters depending on the final architecture of the promoters in an unpredictable way. Taken together, the data presented here demonstrate how small changes in the architecture of bacterial promoters could result in drastic changes in the final regulatory logic of the system, with important implications for the understanding of natural complex promoters in bacteria and their engineering for novel applications.