The heat-shock-regulated grpE gene of Escherichia coli is required for bacterial growth at all temperatures but is dispensable in certain mutant backgrounds.

Previous work has established that the grpE+ gene product is a heat shock protein that is essential for bacteriophage lambda growth at all temperatures and for Escherichia coli growth at temperatures above 43 degrees C. Here it is shown that the grpE+ gene product is essential for bacterial viability at all temperatures. The strategy required constructing a grpE deletion derivative carrying a selectable chloramphenicol drug resistance marker provided by an omega insertion and showing that this deletion construct can be crossed into the bacterial chromosome if and only if a functional grpE+ gene is present elsewhere in the same cell. As a control, the same omega insertion could be placed immediately downstream of the grpE+ coding sequence without any observable effects on host growth. This result demonstrates that the inability to construct a grpE-deleted E. coli strain is not simply due to a lethal polar effect on neighboring gene expression. Unexpectedly, it was found that the grpE deletion derivative could be crossed into the bacterial chromosome in a strain that was defective in DnaK function. Further analysis showed that it was not the lack of DnaK function per se that allowed E. coli to tolerate a deletion in the grpE+ gene. Rather, it was the presence of unknown extragenic suppressors of a dnaK mutation that somehow compensated for the deficiency in both DnaK and GrpE function.