Such

conditions often include environmental niches with limiting essential metals such as iron, zinc, magnesium, and manganese. The ability of Listeria to sequester these metals undoubtedly plays a role in the pathogenic cycle and the process of infection. In the external environment, selleck chemicals llc Listeria utilizes siderophores produced by other bacteria that chelate iron with high affinity to sequester iron from the environment (Simon et al., 1995). In the human host, iron is largely unavailable because of the metal being tightly bound to a number of host proteins (e.g. ferritin and hemosiderin) and the pathogen must compete for iron bound to heme and other sources to cause infection (McLaughlin et al., 2011; Xiao et al., 2011). After iron, zinc is the most abundant transition metal in the human body (Outten & O’Halloran, 2001). It is necessary for almost all living organisms as it acts as both structural and catalytic SAHA HDAC nmr cofactors in numerous enzymes and proteins (Patzer & Hantke, 1998).

However, high concentrations of zinc can be extremely toxic to the bacterial cell and so zinc homeostasis must be maintained through expression of uptake or efflux systems (Beard et al., 1997; Rensing et al., 1997). Under conditions of zinc starvation, bacterial cells can induce high-affinity zinc uptake systems. High-affinity transporters have been described in numerous bacteria, and probably the best characterized are the ZnuABC system in Escherichia coli and the ycdHI-yceA system in Bacillus subtilis (Patzer & Hantke, 1998; Gaballa et al., 2002). Both of these

systems are ABC transporters consisting of a periplasmic binding protein (encoded by znuA, ycdH), a membrane permease (znuB, yceA), and an ATPase (znuC, ycdI). For the most part, these high-affinity zinc uptake systems are under the control of the zinc uptake regulator, Zur (Gaballa & Helmann, 1998; Patzer & Hantke, 2000). In L. monocytogenes, a Zur-like protein (encoded by zurR) has been identified in an operon with two other genes, zurM and zurA, which form a putative high-affinity uptake system (Dalet et al., 1999). Aside from the initial SB-3CT identification of this operon, the physiological role of the regulator and the identification of the ZurR regulon are relatively unexplored. In the current study, we show that zurR is important for normal colony formation and cell size and for survival of toxic levels of zinc. A number of genes harboring a sequence similar to the B. subtilis ZurR binding site (the Zur box) were identified using a bioinformatic approach, and we demonstrate that a number of these putative transporters are regulated by ZurR in L. monocytogenes. Similar to other metalloregulators (Fur and PerR) (Rea et al., 2004), we show that ZurR plays an important role in the successful infection of the murine model. Bacterial strains and plasmids used in this study are listed in Table 1.