Abstract
Global transcriptional regulators play key roles during bacterial adaptation to environmental fluctuations. Protein MafR from Enterococcus faecalis was shown to activate the transcription of many genes on a genome-wide scale. We proposed that MafR is a global regulator of the Mga/AtxA family. Here, we purified an untagged form of the MafR protein and found that it binds to linear double-stranded DNAs in a nonsequence-specific manner. Moreover, multiple MafR units (likely dimers) bind sequentially to the DNA molecule generating multimeric complexes. On DNAs that contain the promoter of the mafR gene, MafR recognizes a potentially curved DNA region. We discuss that a characteristic of the Mga/AtxA regulators might be their ability to recognize particular DNA shapes across the bacterial genomes.