The ornibactin biosynthesis and transport genes of Burkholderia cenocepacia are regulated by an extracytoplasmic function sigma factor which is a part of the Fur regulon.

Burkholderia cenocepacia mutants that fail to produce the siderophore ornibactin were obtained following mutagenesis with mini-Tn5Tp. These mutants were shown to be growth restricted under conditions of iron depletion. In eight of the mutants, the transposon had integrated into one of two genes, orbI and orbJ, encoding nonribosomal peptide synthetases.

Genetic and transcriptional analysis of the siderophore malleobactin biosynthesis and transport genes in the human pathogen Burkholderia pseudomallei K96243.

Burkholderia pseudomallei is a gram-negative facultative intracellular pathogen that causes melioidosis, an invasive disease of humans and animals. To address the response of this bacterium to iron-limiting conditions, we first performed a global transcriptional analysis of RNA extracted from bacteria grown under iron-limiting and iron-rich conditions by microarrays. We focused our study on those open reading frames (ORFs) induced under iron limitation, which encoded predicted proteins that could be involved in the biosynthesis and uptake of the siderophore malleobactin.

The Burkholderia cepacia fur gene: co-localization with omlA and absence of regulation by iron.

The ferric uptake regulator (Fur) functions as a transcription repressor of many genes in bacteria in response to iron, but the presence of a functional equivalent of this protein has not been demonstrated in Burkholderia cepacia. A segment of the Burkholderia pseudomallei fur gene was amplified using degenerate primers and used to identify chromosomal restriction fragments containing the entire fur genes of B. cepacia and B.