Lighting up the nascent cell wall

Abstract

Many antibiotics target the assembly of the cell wall of eubacteria, a netlike 3D structure composed of layers of peptidoglycan (PG). Very little is known about how the lipid precursor of PG, lipid II, is inserted into the existing cell wall in a growing and dividing cell. A new study provides a powerful tool for investigating this insertion process and opens the door to understanding the mechanism of eubacterial cell wall biogenesis.