Project description:The cyanobacterial circadian clock generates genome-wide transcriptional oscillations and regulates cell division, but the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. Here, we show that the response regulator RpaA serves as the master regulator of these clock outputs. Deletion of rpaA abrogates gene expression rhythms globally and arrests cells in a dawn-like expression state. Although rpaA deletion causes core oscillator failure by perturbing clock gene expression, rescuing oscillator function does not restore global expression rhythms. We show that phosphorylated RpaA regulates the expression of not only clock components, generating feedback on the core oscillator, but also a small set of circadian effectors that, in turn, orchestrate genome-wide transcriptional rhythms. Expression of constitutively active RpaA is sufficient to switch cells from a dawn-like to a dusk-like expression state as well as to block cell division. Hence, complex global circadian phenotypes can be generated by controlling the phosphorylation of a single transcription factor.
Project description:Cyanobacteria evolved a robust circadian clock, which has a profound influence on fitness and metabolism under daily light-dark (LD) cycles. In the model cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942, a functional clock is not required for diurnal growth, but mutants defective for the response regulator that mediates transcriptional rhythms in the wild-type, regulator of phycobilisome association A (RpaA), cannot be cultured under LD conditions. We found that rpaA-null mutants are inviable after several hours in the dark and compared the metabolomes of wild-type and rpaA-null strains to identify the source of lethality. Here, we show that the wild-type metabolome is very stable throughout the night, and this stability is lost in the absence of RpaA. Additionally, an rpaA mutant accumulates excessive reactive oxygen species (ROS) during the day and is unable to clear it during the night. The rpaA-null metabolome indicates that these cells are reductant-starved in the dark, likely because enzymes of the primary nighttime NADPH-producing pathway are direct targets of RpaA. Because NADPH is required for processes that detoxify ROS, conditional LD lethality likely results from inability of the mutant to activate reductant-requiring pathways that detoxify ROS when photosynthesis is not active. We identified second-site mutations and growth conditions that suppress LD lethality in the mutant background that support these conclusions. These results provide a mechanistic explanation as to why rpaA-null mutants die in the dark, further connect the clock to metabolism under diurnal growth, and indicate that RpaA likely has important unidentified functions during the day.