{"doi":"10.7554/elife.100376.2.sa3","title":"Reviewer #1 (Public review): A General Mechanism for Initiating the General Stress Response in Bacteria","abstract":"The General Stress Response promotes survival of bacteria in adverse conditions, but how sensor proteins transduce species-specific signals to initiate the response is not known. The serine/threonine phosphatase RsbU initiates the General Stress Response in B. subtilis upon binding a partner protein (RsbT) that is released from sequestration by environmental stresses. We report that RsbT activates RsbU by inducing otherwise flexible linkers of RsbU to form a short coiled-coil that dimerizes and activates the phosphatase domains. Importantly, we present evidence that related coiled-coil linkers and phosphatase dimers transduce signals from diverse sensor domains to control the General Stress Response and other signaling across bacterial phyla. This coiled-coil linker transduction mechanism additionally suggests a resolution to the mystery of how shared sensory domains control serine/threonine phosphatases, diguanylate cyclases and histidine kinases. We propose that this provides bacteria with a modularly exchangeable toolkit for the evolution of diverse signaling pathways.","journal":null,"year":2025,"id":566822,"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":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9595,"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":760481,"name":"Kristin Ho","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1471088,"name":"Ramasamy P Kumar","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1471089,"name":"Jesse B Hopkins","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1471090,"name":"Maxwell B Watkins","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1330474,"name":"Salvatore LaRussa","orcid":"0000-0003-4749-1356","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1289804,"name":"Suhaily Caban-Penix","orcid":"0009-0007-6512-5399","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1045064,"name":"Logan A Calderone","orcid":"0000-0002-0960-3831","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":187316,"name":"Niels Bradshaw","orcid":null,"position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1231587,"name":"Rishika Baral","orcid":"0000-0002-9365-8877","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":0,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:56:40.491968Z","pmid":null,"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":[]}