{"doi":"10.1111/mmi.15344","title":"Remote Regulation by <scp>VirB</scp>, the Transcriptional Anti‐Silencer of <i>Shigella</i> Virulence Genes, Provides Mechanistic Information","abstract":"Classical models of bacterial transcription show regulators binding close to promoter elements to exert their effect. However, the scope for long-range regulation exists, especially by nucleoid structuring proteins, like H-NS. Here, long-range regulation by VirB, a transcriptional regulator that alleviates H-NS-mediated silencing of key virulence genes in Shigella species, is explored in vivo to test the limits of long-range regulation and provide further mechanistic insight. VirB-dependent regulation of the well-characterized icsP promoter persists if its cognate site is repositioned 1 kb, 3.3 kb, and even 4.7 kb further upstream than its native position in a plasmid reporter. VirB-dependent regulation diminishes with binding site distance. While increasing cellular VirB pools elevated promoter activity in all constructs with wild-type VirB binding sites, it did not generate a disproportionate increase in promoter activity from remote sites relative to the native site. Since VirB occludes a constitutively active promoter (PT5) when docked adjacent to its -35 element, we next moved the VirB binding site far outside the promoter region. We discovered that VirB still interfered with promoter activity. These findings and those generated from molecular roadblocks engineered around a distally located VirB-binding site are reconciled with the various models of transcriptional regulation by VirB.","journal":"Molecular Microbiology","year":2025,"id":531917,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":3,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9591,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1044493,"name":"Monika M. A. Karney","orcid":"0000-0002-8863-7676","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1413178,"name":"Juniper S. Rosen","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":531967,"name":"Alexander Karabachev","orcid":"0000-0003-1747-1194","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1413179,"name":"Elizabeth N. Huezo","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1044496,"name":"Helen J. Wing","orcid":"0000-0003-0123-5568","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1412706,"name":"Cody Cris","orcid":"0000-0003-2655-3378","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":57,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:51:18.928280Z","pmid":"39912328","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}