Nucleotide Sequence on Upstream of the cdd Locus in Bacillus subtilis

A 3, 346 bp of the cdd upstream region in Bacillus subtilis was sequenced from the pSO1 (Song BH and J Neuhard. 1989. Mol. Gen. Genet 216: 462-468) and sequence homology was searched to the known genes in Genbank and European Molecular Biology Laboratory databanks. Five complete and one truncated putative coding sequences deduced from the nucleotide sequence were found through the ORF searching by Genetyx and Macvector software, and one of them was identified as the dgk (diacylglycerol kinase) gene and another, a truncated one, as the phoH (phosphate starvation-inducible gene) gene. The B. subtilis dgk gene, having a role for response to several environmental stress signals, revealed an open reading frame of 134 amino acids with 43.1% of sequence identity to the Streptococcus mutans dgk gene. The carboxy terminal 59 residues of the truncated phoH gene showed 52.7% and 34.5% of sequence identity in amino acids with the corresponding genes of Mycobacterium leprae and Escherichia coli. The four remaining coding sequences consisting of 115, 421, 91, and 91 residues were thought to be unknown ORFs because they have no significant similarity to known genes.