Isolation of arginine auxotrophs, cloning by mutant complementation, and sequence analysis of the argC gene from the cyanobacterium Anabaena species PCC 7120.

Arginine auxotrophs of the dinitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium Anabaena species strain PCC 7120 were isolated after ultraviolet light mutagenesis and penicillin enrichment. Two of these auxotrophs were complemented by a cosmid gene library of the wild-type strain established in Escherichia coli that was transferred en masse to the mutants by conjugation. The gene complementing one of those mutants was found to complement an E. coli argC mutant. Sequencing analysis of the gene showed that it encodes a 322-residue polypeptide that is homologous to the ArgC protein of E. coli, Bacillus subtilis and Streptomyces clavuligerus and to the C-terminal moiety of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae ARG5,6 gene product, N-acetylglutamate semialdehyde dehydrogenase. A cysteine residue present in a highly conserved domain in the five proteins is probably located in the active site of the enzyme. Conserved among the ArgC proteins, sequences resembling the primary structure of nucleotide-binding domains are also found. Downstream of the Anabaena argC gene seven nearly perfect repeats of a heptanucleotide (consensus sequence:5'-CTAATGA-3') are found.