Cross-talk between an orphan response regulator and a noncognate histidine kinase in Streptomyces coelicolor.

Two-component systems (TCSs), typically consisting of a histidine kinase (HK) and a cognate response regulator (RR), are the most common signaling systems in bacteria. Besides paired genes encoding TCSs, there also exists unpaired HKs and orphan RRs. In Streptomyces coelicolor, 13 orphan RRs have been annotated. Because of lack of cognate HKs, little is known as yet about the regulation of orphan RRs. Bioinformatic analysis revealed that several orphan RRs had high amino acid sequence identities with RRs from typical TCSs in S. coelicolor. Among them, the orphan RR SCO3818 and RR SCO0204, which paired with HK SCO0203, showed the highest identity (65%), suggesting that the two RRs might both be under the regulation of SCO0203. Following studies showed that SCO0203 could phosphorylate not only SCO0204 but also SCO3818. Deletion of either sco0203 or sco3818 led to enhanced production of blue-pigmented antibiotic actinorhodin, which indicated a functional correlation between SCO0203 and SCO3818. These results suggested that SCO3818 might be regulated by SCO0203. This is the first report describing the regulation of an orphan RR by an HK. Moreover, this is also the first identification of cross-talk between different TCS components in S. coelicolor.