Cloning, sequencing, and mapping of the bacterioferritin gene (bfr) of Escherichia coli K-12

Abstract

The bacterioferritin (BFR) of Escherichia coli K-12 is an iron-storage hemoprotein, previously identified as cytochrome b1. The bacterioferritin gene (bfr) has been cloned, sequenced, and located in the E. coli linkage map. Initially a gene fusion encoding a BFR-lambda hybrid protein (Mr 21,000) was detected by immunoscreening a lambda gene bank containing Sau3A restriction fragments of E. coli DNA. The bfr gene was mapped to 73 min (the str-spc region) in the physical map of the E. coli chromosome by probing Southern blots of restriction digests of E. coli DNA with a fragment of the bfr gene. The intact bfr gene was then subcloned from the corresponding lambda phage from the gene library of Kohara et al. (Y. Kohara, K. Akiyama, and K. Isono, Cell 50:495-508, 1987). The bfr gene comprises 474 base pairs and 158 amino acid codons (including the start codon), and it encodes a polypeptide having essentially the same size (Mr 18,495) and N-terminal sequence as the purified protein. A potential promoter sequence was detected in the 5' noncoding region, but it was not associated with an "iron box" sequence (i.e., a binding site for the iron-dependent Fur repressor protein). BFR was amplified to 14% of the total protein in a bfr plasmid-containing strain. An additional unidentified gene (gen-64), encoding a relatively basic 64-residue polypeptide and having the same polarity as bfr, was detected upstream of the bfr gene.