In the photosynthetic bacterium Rhodospirillum rubrum, the presence of carbon monoxide (CO) induces expression of several proteins. These include carbon monoxide dehydrogenase (CODH) and a CO-tolerant hydrogenase. Together these enzymes catalyze the following conversion: CO ؉ H 2 O 3 CO 2 ؉ H 2 . This system enables R. rubrum to grow in the dark on CO as the sole energy source. Expression of this system has been shown previously to be regulated at the transcriptional level by CO. We have now identified the remainder of the CO-regulated genes encoded in a contiguous region of the R. rubrum genome. These genes, cooMKLXU, apparently encode proteins related to the function of the CO-induced hydrogenase. As seen before with the gene for the large subunit of the CO-induced hydrogenase (cooH), most of the proteins predicted by these additional genes show significant sequence similarity to subunits of Escherichia coli hydrogenase 3. In addition, all of the newly identified coo gene products show similarity to subunits of NADH-quinone oxidoreductase (energyconserving NADH dehydrogenase I) from various eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms. We have found that dicyclohexylcarbodiimide, an inhibitor of mitochondrial NADH dehydrogenase I (also called complex I), inhibits the CO-induced hydrogenase as well. We also show that expression of the cooMKLXUH operon is regulated by CO and the transcriptional activator CooA in a manner similar to that of the cooFSCTJ operon that encodes the subunits of CODH and related proteins.In the presence of carbon monoxide (CO), Rhodospirillum rubrum induces synthesis of a CO-oxidizing system. This system catalyzes the net reaction CO ϩ H 2 O 3 CO 2 ϩ H 2 . The reaction is carried out by two enzymes: CO dehydrogenase (CODH) and a CO-tolerant hydrogenase. CODH is a wellcharacterized nickel-iron enzyme (10) that carries out the oxidation of CO to CO 2 , producing two reducing equivalents. Hydrogenase then consumes these reducing equivalents by the reduction of two protons to H 2 (9, 17). Intermediate electron carriers (including the ferredoxin-like small subunit of CODH [17]) may also be involved in the reaction.The hydrogenase is tightly membrane bound and has yet to be purified, although the sequence of its large subunit (CooH) and several of its properties have been described previously (22). A wide variety of hydrogenases from other organisms, however, have been purified and characterized. These hydrogenases have been found to fall into three distinct categories: Fe-only, Ni-Fe, and Ni-Fe-Se enzymes (for reviews, see references 1, 4, and 56). The CO-induced hydrogenase from R. rubrum apparently belongs to the Ni-Fe class, on the basis of its protein sequence and the requirement of Ni for activity (22).There seem to be two CO-regulated transcripts in R. rubrum. The first, cooFSCTJ, encodes CODH and related proteins (27,29,43) and has been shown to be regulated by the product of the cooA gene (43). CooA appears to bind to a specific region of DNA upstream of the cooF promoter in a CO-dependent m...