TY  - JOUR
A1  - Neuhaus, Alexander
A1  - Selvaraj, Muniyandi
A1  - Salzer, Ralf
A1  - Langer, Julian David
A1  - Kruse, Kerstin
A1  - Kirchner, Lennart
A1  - Sanders, Kelly
A1  - Daum, Bertram
A1  - Averhoff, Beate
A1  - Gold, Vicki A. M.
T1  - Cryo-electron microscopy reveals two distinct type IV pili assembled by the same bacterium
T2  - Nature Communications
N2  - Type IV pili are flexible filaments on the surface of bacteria, consisting of a helical assembly of pilin proteins. They are involved in bacterial motility (twitching), surface adhesion, biofilm formation and DNA uptake (natural transformation). Here, we use cryo-electron microscopy and mass spectrometry to show that the bacterium Thermus thermophilus produces two forms of type IV pilus ("wide" and "narrow"), differing in structure and protein composition. Wide pili are composed of the major pilin PilA4, while narrow pili are composed of a so-far uncharacterized pilin which we name PilA5. Functional experiments indicate that PilA4 is required for natural transformation, while PilA5 is important for twitching motility.
KW  - Bacterial structural biology
KW  - Cellular microbiology
KW  - Cryoelectron microscopy
Y1  - 2020
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/53531
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-535314
N1  - Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
VL  - 11
IS  - 1, Art. 2231
SP  - 1
EP  - 13
PB  - Nature Publishing Group UK
CY  - [London]
ER  -