Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2018 Oct 1;8:14578. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-32829-w

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

© The Author(s) 2018

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

PMC Copyright notice

S. aureus agr operon for toxin production. The cyclic autoinducing peptide (AIP) is the signaling molecule coded for by agrD and processed by agrB. Mature AIP is secreted to the cell surface where it binds to and activates the histidine kinase AgrC on the same cell or on a different cell. Consequently, AgrC autophosphorylates and transfers its phosphoryl group to Asp 59 on the N-terminal domain of the response regulator protein AgrA. Phosphorylated AgrA undergoes a conformational change to form a dimer, which enables its C-terminal DNA-binding domains to bind to promoter P2 to activate AIP transcription in an autocatalytic fashion. When the AIP concentration reaches a certain threshold AgrA also binds to the tenfold weaker promoter P3, which drives the transcription of RNAIII, a master regulator of expression a series of toxins and virulence factors in the post-exponential growth phase. RNAIII encodes the hemolysin δ toxin (hld). The drug discovery target in this work is the inhibition of AgrA binding to promoter P3, as indicated by the red X.