The Lac Operon in E. Coli

The lac operon (lactose operon) is an operon required for the transport and metabolism of lactose in Escherichia coli and many other enteric bacteria. Although glucose is the preferred carbon source for most bacteria, the lac operon allows for the effective digestion of lactose when glucose is not available through the activity of beta-galactosidase. Gene regulation of the lac operon was the first genetic regulatory mechanism to be understood clearly, so it has become a foremost example of prokaryotic gene regulation. It is often discussed in introductory molecular and cellular biology classes for this reason. This lactose metabolism system was used by François Jacob and Jacques Monod to determine how a biological cell knows which enzyme to synthesize. Their work on the lac operon won them the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1965. Bacterial operons are polycistronic transcripts that are able to produce multiple proteins from one mRNA transcript. In this case, when lactose is required as a sugar source for the bacterium, the three genes of the lac operon can be expressed and their subsequent proteins translated: lacZ, lacY, and lacA. The gene product of lacZ is β-galactosidase which cleaves lactose, a disaccharide, into glucose and galactose. lacY encodes Beta-galactoside permease, a membrane protein which becomes embedded in the cytoplasmic membrane to enable the cellular transport of lactose into the cell. Finally, lacA encodes Galactoside acetyltransferase. It would be wasteful to produce enzymes when no lactose were available or if a more preferable energy source such as glucose were available. The lac operon uses a two-part control mechanism to ensure that the cell expends energy producing the enzymes encoded by the lac operon only when necessary. In the absence of lactose, the lac repressor, lacI, halts production of the enzymes encoded by the lac operon. The lac repressor is always expressed unless a co-inducer binds to it. In other words, it is transcribed only in the presence of small molecule co-inducer. In the presence of glucose, the catabolite activator protein (CAP), required for production of the enzymes, remains inactive, and EIIAGlc shuts down lactose permease to prevent transport of lactose into the cell. This dual control mechanism causes the sequential utilization of glucose and lactose in two distinct growth phases, known as diauxie. The lac operon consists of three structural genes, and a promoter, a terminator, regulator, and an operator. The three structural genes are: lacZ, lacY, and lacA. lacZ encodes β-galactosidase (LacZ), an intracellular enzyme that cleaves the disaccharide lactose into glucose and galactose. lacY encodes Beta-galactoside permease (LacY), a transmembrane symporter that pumps β-galactosides including lactose into the cell using a proton gradient in the same direction. Permease increases the permeability of the cell to β-galactosides. lacA encodes β-galactoside transacetylase (LacA), an enzyme that transfers an acetyl group from acetyl-CoA to β-galactosides. Only lacZ and lacY appear to be necessary for lactose catabolism. Genetic nomenclature Three-letter abbreviations are used to describe phenotypes in bacteria including E. coli. Examples include: Lac (the ability to use lactose), His (the ability to synthesize the amino acid histidine) Mot (swimming motility) SmR (resistance to the antibiotic streptomycin) In the case of Lac, wild type cells are Lac+ and are able to use lactose as a carbon and energy source, while Lac− mutant derivatives cannot use lactose. The same three letters are typically used (lower-case, italicized) to label the genes involved in a particular phenotype, where each different gene is additionally distinguished by an extra letter. The lac genes encoding enzymes are lacZ, lacY, and lacA. The fourth lac gene is lacI, encoding the lactose repressor—"I" stands for inducibility. One may distinguish between structural genes encoding enzymes, and regulatory genes encoding proteins that affect gene expression. Current usage expands the phenotypic nomenclature to apply to proteins: thus, LacZ is the protein product of the lacZ gene, β-galactosidase. Various short sequences that are not genes also affect gene expression, including the lac promoter, lac p, and the lac operator, lac o. Although it is not strictly standard usage, mutations affecting lac o are referred to as lac oc, for historical reasons.

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