Abstract
There have been known various mechanisms in response to environmental stresses in bacteria. Upon serious stress like heat shock, usually independent cellular machineries start functioning at the same time and try to protect their own targets. Those machineries involve molecular chaperones, a stress sigma (SigB) regulon, extra-cytoplasmic function (ECF) sigma networks, two-component regulatory systems (TCS), subsets of transcription factors, and so on. In this review, I introduce some of our recent results with respect to the new aspects of stress response machineries. Those are an essential function of DnaK chaperone machine, a new regulation of SigB activation cascade, a general structure of ECF sigma and anti-sigma relationship, and findings from extraordinary- multiple knockout of TCS genes. These machineries are, at least in part, dependent on one another by sharing one or more components or transferring signals to other machineries. These phenomena demonstrate a functional network among stress response machineries.
