Fig 1.

Confirmation of nonpolar deletion and rescue of expression of the adrenergic kinase-encoding genes qseC and qseE. (A) Summary of the QseC- and QseE-dependent signaling cascade involved in virulence regulation as reported prior to this work. Genes whose expression had been shown to be affected by epinephrine have Φ next to them. Asterisks indicate that the ler promoter is highly regulated by many transcription factors, including GrlA, Pch, GadE, QseA, and H-NS (2, 6, 25, 30, 67). epi, epinephrine; NE, norepinephrine; AE, attaching and effacing. (B) qRT-PCR analysis examining qseC and qseE expression in the wt and ΔqseC, ΔqseE, and ΔqseC ΔqseE mutant strains and the complemented double mutant strains grown to an OD₆₀₀ of 1.0 in low-glucose DMEM. The genes' transcript levels were quantified as fold differences normalized to wt gene transcription levels. The samples' rpoA transcript levels were used as internal controls to normalize the output C_T values. The data are from at least three independently grown replicates.