In:
mBio, American Society for Microbiology
Kurzfassung:
In order to grow, bacterial cells must both create and break down their cell wall. The enzymes that are responsible for these processes are the target of some of our best antibiotics. Our understanding of the proteins that break down the wall— cell wall hydrolases—has been limited by redundancy among the large number of hydrolases many bacteria contain. To solve this problem, we identified 42 cell wall hydrolases in Bacillus subtilis and created a strain lacking 40 of them. We show that cells can survive using only a single cell wall hydrolase; this means that to understand the growth of B. subtilis in standard laboratory conditions, it is only necessary to study a very limited number of proteins, simplifying the problem substantially. We additionally show that the ∆40 strain is a research tool to characterize hydrolases, using it to identify three “helper” hydrolases that act in certain stress conditions.
Materialart:
Online-Ressource
ISSN:
2150-7511
DOI:
10.1128/mbio.01760-23
Sprache:
Englisch
Verlag:
American Society for Microbiology
Publikationsdatum:
2023
ZDB Id:
2557172-2
