Endospores are formed and nurtured completely within a mother cell, which must lyse to release the spore into the environment. A more sophisticated and prolonged example of stress response is spore formation, or sporulation, wherein the bacterial genome is sequestered in a safe place (the spore) until environmental conditions improve, upon which the spore quickly germinates and returns to the vegetative state. These strategies frequently involve rapid changes in gene expression that temporarily alter the phenotype of a cell and allow it to survive. Time course analyses of spore coat assembly have revealed that two main steps can be distinguished in coat morphogenesis: the initial recruitment of proteins to the spore surface as a scaffold cap, followed by spore encasement in a series of successive waves.Ĭoat assembly is regulated at the transcriptional level by the sequential expression of individual coat genes and at the protein level by a small group of coat morphogenetic proteins that coordinate both the recruitment of coat proteins to specific coat layers and spore encasement.īacteria have many strategies for surviving environmental challenges. subtilis, referred to as the spore crust. These studies led to the discovery of the outermost layer of the coat in B. In addition to its protective role, the spore coat influences the process of spore germination and defines the type of interactions that spores can establish with various surfaces in the environment.įluorescence microscopy in combination with high-resolution image analysis has produced a spatially scaled coat protein interaction network indicating that the coat is organized into four distinct layers. The Bacillus subtilis spore coat is a multilayered protective structure composed of more than 70 different proteins.
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