In:
eLife, eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd, Vol. 7 ( 2018-02-22)
Kurzfassung:
Many bacteria are surrounded by both a cell membrane and a cell wall – a rigid outer covering made of sugars and short protein chains. The cell wall often determines which of a variety of shapes – such as rods or spheres – the bacteria grow into. One protein required to form the rod shape is called MreB. This protein forms filaments that bind to the bacteria’s cell membrane and associate with the enzymes that build the cell wall. Together, these filament-enzyme complexes rotate around the cell to build and reinforce the cell wall in a hoop-like manner. But how do the MreB filaments know how to move around the circumference of the rod, instead of moving in any other direction? Using a technique called total internal reflection microscopy to study how MreB filaments move across bacteria cells, Hussain, Wivagg et al. show that the filaments sense the shape of a bacterium by orienting along the direction of greatest curvature. As a result, the filaments in rod-shaped cells orient and move around the rod, while in spherical bacteria they move in all directions. However, spherical bacteria can regenerate into rods from small surface ‘bulges’. The MreB filaments in the bulges move in an oriented way, helping them to generate the rod shape. Hussain, Wivagg et al. also found that forcing cells that lack a cell wall into a rod shape caused the MreB filaments bound to the cell membrane to orient and circle around the rod. This shows that the organization of the filaments is sufficient to shape the cell wall. In the future, determining what factors control the activity of the MreB filaments and the enzymes they associate with might reveal new targets for antibiotics that disrupt the cell wall and so kill the bacteria. This will require higher resolution microscopes to be used to examine the cell wall in more detail. The activity of all the proteins involved in building cell walls will also need to be extensively characterized.
Materialart:
Online-Ressource
ISSN:
2050-084X
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.32471.001
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.32471.002
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10.7554/eLife.32471.003
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10.7554/eLife.32471.006
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10.7554/eLife.32471.007
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10.7554/eLife.32471.004
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10.7554/eLife.32471.005
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10.7554/eLife.32471.008
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10.7554/eLife.32471.009
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10.7554/eLife.32471.011
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10.7554/eLife.32471.012
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10.7554/eLife.32471.010
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10.7554/eLife.32471.013
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10.7554/eLife.32471.014
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10.7554/eLife.32471.015
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10.7554/eLife.32471.017
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10.7554/eLife.32471.018
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10.7554/eLife.32471.016
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10.7554/eLife.32471.019
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10.7554/eLife.32471.020
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10.7554/eLife.32471.021
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10.7554/eLife.32471.022
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10.7554/eLife.32471.023
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10.7554/eLife.32471.024
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10.7554/eLife.32471.026
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10.7554/eLife.32471.027
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10.7554/eLife.32471.025
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10.7554/eLife.32471.028
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10.7554/eLife.32471.029
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10.7554/eLife.32471.030
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10.7554/eLife.32471.034
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10.7554/eLife.32471.031
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10.7554/eLife.32471.032
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10.7554/eLife.32471.035
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10.7554/eLife.32471.036
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10.7554/eLife.32471.037
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10.7554/eLife.32471.038
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10.7554/eLife.32471.040
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10.7554/eLife.32471.039
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10.7554/eLife.32471.041
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10.7554/eLife.32471.042
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10.7554/eLife.32471.045
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DOI:
10.7554/eLife.32471.048
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.32471.051
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.32471.052
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.32471.050
Sprache:
Englisch
Verlag:
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
Publikationsdatum:
2018
ZDB Id:
2687154-3
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