Use of Mutagenesis and Functional Screens to Characterize Essential Genes Involved in Lipopolysaccharide Transport.

Structure-function analysis is a powerful strategy to characterize the contribution of specific residues to the biogenesis and function of a protein. This approach requires the characterization of strains that express mutant alleles in the absence of the wild-type protein. When studying nonessential bacterial genes, collections of mutants can be easily constructed by introducing plasmid-encoded alleles of interest into a strain that already lacks the wild-type gene. However, this high-throughput approach is not applicable to studying essential genes since their respective null strains are not viable. While there are several tools currently available to modify essential genes, they can be greatly limited by the amount of effort it takes to build and analyze each mutant strain. Here, we describe a high-throughput system for the rapid structure-function analysis of essential genes involved in lipopolysaccharide transport in Escherichia coli. This method, which can be applied to study any essential gene, relies on the initial construction of a single bacterial strain that can be used to generate and functionally characterize multiple plasmid-encoded alleles in under 24 h. We will discuss the advantages and possible shortcomings of our protocol in comparison to other commonly used methods.