A comprehensive guide to pilus biogenesis in Gram-negative bacteria

Hospenthal, M.K. and Costa, Tiago and Waksman, Gabriel (2017) A comprehensive guide to pilus biogenesis in Gram-negative bacteria. Nature Reviews Microbiology 15 (6), pp. 365-379. ISSN 1740-1526.

Full text not available from this repository.

Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro.2017.40

Abstract

Pili are crucial virulence factors for many Gram-negative pathogens. These surface structures provide bacteria with a link to their external environments by enabling them to interact with, and attach to, host cells, other surfaces or each other, or by providing a conduit for secretion. Recent high-resolution structures of pilus filaments and the machineries that produce them, namely chaperone-usher pili, type IV pili, conjugative type IV secretion pili and type V pili, are beginning to explain some of the intriguing biological properties that pili exhibit, such as the ability of chaperone-usher pili and type IV pili to stretch in response to external forces. By contrast, conjugative pili provide a conduit for the exchange of genetic information, and recent high-resolution structures have revealed an integral association between the pilin subunit and a phospholipid molecule, which may facilitate DNA transport. In addition, progress in the area of cryo-electron tomography has provided a glimpse of the overall architecture of the type IV pilus machinery. In this Review, we examine recent advances in our structural understanding of various Gram-negative pilus systems and discuss their functional implications.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
School:	School of Science > Biological Sciences
Depositing User:	Administrator
Date Deposited:	18 Jul 2017 12:11
Last Modified:	18 Jul 2017 12:11
URI:	https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/19098

Statistics

Archive Staff Only (login required)

Edit/View Item