Bacterial Discrimination by FISH using Molecular Chaperon GroE

FISH(Fluorescence In Situ hybridization) is a powerful method for the analysis of the phylogenetic classification of microorganism in the environment. In many cases, 16s rRNA sequences of microorganisms are employed as target probe. Here we showed that novel probe was used in FISH in order to discriminate among the bacteria including psychrophile, mesophile, and thermophile. Molecular Chaperon GroE is a best characterized protein based on Escherichia coli and essential for bacterial proliferation. In E. coli, the amount of GroEL protein per cell reaches to about 5% of total cellualr protein at heat-shock response. This response occurred at transcription levels, the amount of groEL mRNA increases at about 10-fold per cell, reaches to 0.4% of total synthesized RNA. Therefore, we considered that groEL gene was employed FISH analysis as a target probe. Moreover, we found that Gly-Gly-Met (GGM) repeats in the carboxy-terminal of GroEL strongly conserved among psychrophile and mesophile, but not thermophile. In this report, we attempted to discriminate among the bacteria including psychrophile, mesophile, and thermophile by FISH using the specific sequence of GroEL as a probe. Furthermore, we proposed the novel phylogenetic trees based on the amino acids sequences of carboxy-terminal of GroEL for bacterial evolution by temperature adaptation.