Abstract:
Many gut bacteria degrade polysaccharides, providing nutritional advantages to their
hosts. Fucose, a mucin degradation product, was suggested as a communication molecule between
the resident microbiota and external pathogens. However, the precise role and variants of the
fucose utilization pathway remain to be elucidated. Here, we computationally and experimentally
investigated the fucose utilization operon of E. coli. While the operon is conserved among E. coli
genomes, a variant pathway, in which an ABC transporter system replaces the fucose permease
gene (fucP), was computationally identified in 50 out of 1058 genomes. Comparative genomics
and subsystems analysis results were confirmed by polymerase chain reaction-based screening of
40 human E. coli isolates, which indicated the conservation of fucP in 92.5% of the isolates (vs. 7.5%
of its suggested alternative, yjfF). The in silico predictions were confirmed by in vitro experiments
comparing the growth of E. coli strains K12, BL21, and isogenic fucose-utilization K12 mutants.
Additionally, fucP and fucI transcripts were quantified in E. coli K12 and BL21, after in silico analysis
of their expression in 483 public transcriptomes. In conclusion, E. coli utilizes fucose by two pathway
variants, with measurable transcriptional differences. Future studies will explore this variation’s
impact on signaling and virulence.
