A General Mechanism for the General Stress Response in Bacteria

Bacteria have a widely conserved General Stress Response (GSR) that allows them to survive adverse environmental conditions. However, because the signaling proteins that initiate the GSR have evolved to respond to a vast range of species-specific signals, we lack a general understanding of how they are controlled. Here, we determined the molecular mechanism by which a member of the PPM family of protein serine/threonine phosphatases, RsbU, activates the GSR in B. subtilis. It was known that the phosphatase activity of RsbU is activated through interaction with a partner protein, RsbT, when it is released from a megadalton stress-sensing complex upon environmental stress, but how RsbT activates RsbU was not understood. Here we report that RsbT binds an otherwise flexible linker of RsbU to dimerize and activate its phosphatase domains through a conserved allosteric switch element. Conformational flexibility of the homologous linker was known to control activity of the E. coli GSR-activating protein (RssB), which lacks phosphatase activity and functions as a protease adapter protein, suggesting a unifying model for GSR activation across bacterial phyla. Furthermore, and as we now show, the crossing α-helical conformation of RsbU linkers in the active dimeric state is similar to that predicted for paralogous bacterial phosphatases with diverse N-terminal sensory domains, and to linkers known to control the activity of GGDEF diguanylate cyclases and histidine kinases. We propose that this shared regulatory mechanism provides a modularly exchangeable toolkit for bacteria to recognize diverse environmental signals.