Polymorphism in the collagen-like region of the Bacillus anthracis BclA protein leads to variation in exosporium filament length

We recently identified a Bacillus anthracis glycoprotein which is a structural constituent of the exosporium filaments (P. Sylvestre, E. Couture-Tosi, and M. Mock, Mol. Microbiol. 45:169-178, 2002). This Bacillus collagen-like protein (BclA) contains an internal collagen-like region (CLR) of GXX repeats which includes a large proportion of GPT triplets. Here, we report that the polymorphic marker Ceb-Bams13, for which there are nine alleles (P. Le Fleche et al., BMC Microbiol. 1:2, 2001), maps within the open reading frame encoding BclA. The bclA gene in 11 B. anthracis strains representative of seven Ceb-Bams13 alleles was sequenced and compared to the Ames bclA gene sequence. The amino- and carboxy-terminal sequences surrounding the CLR are conserved. The CLR itself is highly polymorphic: it contains between 17 and 91 GXX repeats and one to eight copies of the 21-amino-acid sequence (GPT)(5)GDTGTT, named the BclA repeat. The length of the filament on the spore surface differed between the strains. We exchanged the bclA gene between strains with different CLRs and examined the spore surfaces by electron microscopy analysis. The length of the BclA CLR is responsible for the variation in filament length.