Comparative Analysis of the IclR-Family of Bacterial Transcription Factors and Their DNA-Binding Motifs: Structure, Positioning, Co-Evolution, Regulon Content

The IclR-family is a large group of transcription factors (TFs) regulating various biological processes in diverse bacteria. Using comparative genomics techniques, we have identified binding motifs of IclR-family TFs, reconstructed regulons and analyzed their content, finding co-occurrences between the regulated COGs (clusters of orthologous genes), useful for future functional characterizations of TFs and their regulated genes. We describe two main types of IclR-family motifs, similar in sequence but different in the arrangement of the half-sites (boxes), with GKTYCRYW(3–4)RYGRAMC and TGRAACAN(1–2)TGTTYCA consensuses, and also predict that TFs in 32 orthologous groups have binding sites comprised of three boxes with alternating direction, which implies two possible alternative modes of dimerization of TFs. We identified trends in site positioning relative to the translational gene start, and show that TFs in 94 orthologous groups bind tandem sites with 18–22 nucleotides between their centers. We predict protein–DNA contacts via the correlation analysis of nucleotides in binding sites and amino acids of the DNA-binding domain of TFs, and show that the majority of interacting positions and predicted contacts are similar for both types of motifs and conform well both to available experimental data and to general protein–DNA interaction trends.