In what they labeled a “surprising” finding, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers studying bacteria from freshwater lakes and soil say they have determined a protein’s essential role in maintaining the germ’s shape.
In what they labeled a “surprising” finding, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers studying bacteria from freshwater lakes and soil say they have determined a protein’s essential role in maintaining the germ’s shape. Because the integrity of a bacterial cell’s “envelope” or enclosure is key to its survival, the finding could advance the search for new and better antibiotics.
The research, described August 15 in the journal mBio, suggests that loss of a protein called OpgH in a widely studied bacterium known as Caulobacter crescentus creates a cascade of activity that disrupts the bubble-like cell envelope protecting the bacterium, resulting in the cell’s death. OpgH is an enzyme that creates glucose-containing molecules known as osmoregulated periplasmic glucans, or OPGs, which fill up the gelatinous in-between spaces of the protective cell envelope.
“In our experiments, when we get rid of the protein OpgH in Caulobacter bacteria, which halts production of OPG sugar molecules, the bacteria can’t survive,” says senior study author Erin Goley, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Read more at: Johns Hopkins Medicine
A fluorescent microscope image of Caulobacter crescentus cells stained to image their membranes. (Photo Credit: Erin Goley, Ph.D)
