摘要:The alkylating agent N -methyl- N '-nitro- N -nitrosoguanidine (MNNG) is known to trigger the adaptive response by inducing the ada -regulon – consisting of three DNA repair enzymes Ada, AlkB, AlkA and the enigmatic AidB. We have applied custom designed tiling arrays to study transcriptional changes in Escherichia coli following a MNNG challenge. Along with the expected upregulation of the adaptive response genes ( ada , alkA and alkB ), we identified a number of differentially expressed transcripts, both novel and annotated. This indicates a wider regulatory response than previously documented. There were 250 differentially-expressed and 2275 similarly-expressed unannotated transcripts. We found novel upregulation of several stress-induced transcripts, including the SOS inducible genes recN and tisAB , indicating a novel role for these genes in alkylation repair. Furthermore, the ada -regulon A and B boxes were found to be insufficient to explain the regulation of the adaptive response genes after MNNG exposure, suggesting that additional regulatory elements must be involved.