got a great book for father's day...it's got a plain black cover, but once you get into it you can't put it down. an investigator goes deep into the seamy underworld...places that would literally make you sick. the main character is known as PrgY- all these guys have wild names- and has a kind of identity crisis. nobody knows what he does or what he's good for. there are some bad guys hanging around - endocarditis, nosocomial infection, bacteremia- and this PrgY guy traps or sequesters pheromone that is produced in a cell. so you see, there's trouble a-brewing.

it's a dark world of pheromone-inducible conjugal plasmids. genetic information- virulence determinants and antibiotic resistance- gets exchanged prolifically, like crack in some neighborhoods. internalized pheromone bonds to PrgX, another important character (a repressive bastard - just ask Asc10), and abolishes PrgX negative regulatory functions, leading to increased expression of conjugal ability. Now it's getting hot!

but it's a dark and scary world. these characters live on Todd-Hewitt broth for days at a time, with only an occasional sandwich fusion protein. a western blot darkens the horizon. random PrgY mutants are hanging around. it's well known that "a significant problem faced by the donor cell is to detect the pheromone produced by nearby recipients while avoiding energetically wasteful self-induction of conjugation functions by its own endogenous pheromone." it's sizzlin'!

the investigator is sharp- handy with the DNA manipulation, the quaquick gel extraction kit, and a QuikChange mutagenous strategy. taking the gram-positive shuttle vector, naming the little plasmids pJRC3, pJRC101, pJRC102, and pJRC104, the darling little clones, she notices that they have an unusual dialect. they talk like this: ggc gac gaa ttc gac ctc ggt a. one of them says, and i quote, "aag tga aaa aaa tag".

other pheromone characters have these wild names: MAGLVTLVFVLSACG, AIALFSLVLACCG, etc. some are pretty bold characters. it would confuse the mailman, i'm sure, but i would guess they don't get much mail in that neighborhood anyway.

as it turns out, PrgY function is dependent on endogenous pheromone. PrgY functions independently of Eep, but there's a model in which PrgY is positioned near Eep, where lipoproteins are processed and released. so we can see them settling down in this working class neighborhood, i guess you could say. PrgY could sequester cCF10, but we don't really know how that turns out.

there's more, but i don't want to give away too much of the plot. let's just say, you won't be able to put it down. i hope i didn't plagiarize too much of it already...you may have to send away to the univ. of minnesota for it- it's my daughter's phd thesis!

Chandler, J. R. (2006). Control of endogenous sex pheromone signalling in Enterococcus Faelis. Dissertation submitted to Univ. of Minnesota Graduate School, Minneapolis MN.