1. Flagellin redundancy in Caulobacter crescentus and its implications for flagellar filament assembly
- Author
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Giulia Grimaldi, Phillip D. Aldridge, Tohru Minamino, Jay X. Tang, Wendy D. Smith, Guanglai Li, Keiichi Namba, Joe Gray, Tomoko Miyata, Alexandra Faulds-Pain, Christine Aldridge, Shuichi Nakamura, and Christopher Birchall
- Subjects
Genetics ,biology ,Caulobacter crescentus ,Macromolecular Substances ,Physiology and Metabolism ,Mutant ,Caulobacteraceae ,Motility ,Flagellum ,biology.organism_classification ,Microbiology ,Phenotype ,Cell biology ,Protein filament ,Microscopy, Electron ,Flagella ,Genes, Bacterial ,biology.protein ,bacteria ,Molecular Biology ,Flagellin ,Gene Deletion ,Locomotion - Abstract
Bacterial flagella play key roles in surface attachment and host-bacterial interactions as well as driving motility. Here, we have investigated the ability of Caulobacter crescentus to assemble its flagellar filament from six flagellins: FljJ, FljK, FljL, FljM, FljN, and FljO. Flagellin gene deletion combinations exhibited a range of phenotypes from no motility or impaired motility to full motility. Characterization of the mutant collection showed the following: (i) that there is no strict requirement for any one of the six flagellins to assemble a filament; (ii) that there is a correlation between slower swimming speeds and shorter filament lengths in Δ fljK Δ fljM mutants; (iii) that the flagellins FljM to FljO are less stable than FljJ to FljL; and (iv) that the flagellins FljK, FljL, FljM, FljN, and FljO alone are able to assemble a filament.
- Published
- 2011