, 1999; Brinkman et al., 2003). A microarray analysis has shown that at least 10% of all Escherichia coli genes are under Lrp control (Tani et al., 2002). For some of these genes, the interaction with leucine is responsible for the modulation of Lrp action, with cases in which leucine potentiates and others in which it reduces the Lrp effect. For a third class of genes, which includes the Lrp structural gene, lrp, leucine has no effect on Lrp action

(Wang et al., 1994). It has long been known that in pathogenic enterobacteria, Lrp controls virulence-associated genes (Nou et al., 1993; Hay et al., 1997; Marshall et al., 1999; Comacho & Casadesus, 2002; Cordone et al., 2005; McFarland et al., 2008). More recently, Lrp has been I-BET-762 molecular weight shown to repress transcription of genes carried on the pathogenicity islands SPI-1 and SPI-2 of Salmonella (Baek et al., 2009). We have previously characterized the lrp gene of C. rodentium, a mouse pathogen that belongs to the family of human and animal pathogens that includes the clinically significant enteropathogenic (EPEC) and enterohemorrhagic (EHEC) E. coli (Cordone et al., 2005). Citrobacter rodentium causes transmissible colonic hyperplasia in mice by attaching and effacing (A/E) lesions through

which it colonizes the host gastrointestinal tract (Luperchio & Schauer, 2001). As EPEC, EHEC, and other human enteropathogens are not able to colonize mice, C. rodentium has been extensively used as a model of human gastrointestinal pathogens in animal experiments and has Apoptosis inhibitor proven useful in revealing phenotypes for proteins not revealed by in vitro Exoribonuclease infection models (Mundy et al., 2005). As in EPEC and EHEC, the C. rodentium genes responsible for the induction of A/E lesions belong to the LEE (locus of enterocyte effacement) pathogenicity island (Mundy et al., 2006). The LEE region

of the chromosome is organized into five polycistronic operons (LEE1–LEE5), two bicistronic operons, and four monocistronic units (Clarke et al., 2003). The LEE1 to LEE3 operons mainly encode structural components of a type III secretion system, the LEE4 operon encodes proteins involved in protein translocation, and the LEE5 operon encodes the proteins needed for intimate attachment. Additional genes within the LEE island encode regulatory proteins, such as effector proteins, chaperones, and transcriptional regulators (Barba et al., 2005). Several studies have shown that a complex regulatory network controls the expression of the LEE genes (Friedberg et al., 1999). The global transcriptional regulator H-NS represses the expression of several LEE genes including the LEE1 operon whose first gene, ler (LEE-encoded regulator), encodes the positive regulator Ler, needed for the expression of several LEE genes. Ler induces the expression of genes repressed by H-NS, thus counteracting the H-NS-mediated repression (Bustamante et al., 2001).