Undiscovered regions on the molecular landscape of flagellar assembly

Abstract

The bacterial flagellum is a motility structure and one of the most complicated motors in the biosphere. A flagellum consists of several dozens of building blocks in different stoichiometries and extends from the cytoplasm to the extracellular space. Flagellar biogenesis follows a strict spatio-temporal regime that is guided by a plethora of flagellar assembly factors and chaperones. The goal of this review is to summarize our current structural and mechanistic knowledge of this intricate process and to identify the undiscovered regions on the molecular landscape of flagellar assembly.