THE POLYGALACTURONASES OF ASPERGILLUS-NIGER ARE ENCODED BY A FAMILY OF DIVERGED GENES

Aspergillus niger produces several polygalacturonases that, with other enzymes, are involved in the degradation of pectin. One of the two previously characterized genes coding for the abundant polygalacturonases I and II (PGI and PGII) found in a commercial pectinase preparation was used as a probe to isolate five more genes by screening a genomic DNA library in phage lambda-EMBL4 using conditions of moderate stringency. The products of these genes were detected in the culture medium of Aspergillus nidulans transformants on the basis of activity measurements and Western-blot analysis using a polyclonal antibody raised against PGI. These transformants were, with one exception, constructed using phage DNA. A. nidulans transformants secreted high amounts of PGI and PGII in comparison to the previously characterized A. niger transformants and a novel polygalacturonase (PGC) was produced at high levels by A. nidulans transformed with the subcloned pgaC gene. This gene was sequenced and the protein-coding region was found to be interrupted by three introns; the different intron/exon organization of the three sequenced A. niger polygalacturonase genes can be explained by the gain or loss of two single introns. The pgaC gene encodes a putative 383-amino-acid prepro-protein that is cleaved after a pair of basic amino acids and shows approximately 60% amino acid sequence similarity to the other polygalacturonases in the mature protein. The N-terminal amino acid sequences of the A. niger polygalacturonases display characteristic amino acid insertions or deletions that are also observed in polygalacturonases of phytopathogenic fungi. In the upstream regions of the A. niger polygalacturonase genes, a sequence of ten conserved nucleotides comprising a CCAAT sequence was found, which is likely to represent a binding site for a regulatory protein as it shows a high similarity to the yeast CYC1 upstream activation site recognized by the HAP2/3/4 activation complex.