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Comment
. 2016 Jul 26;1(8):16121.
doi: 10.1038/nmicrobiol.2016.121.

Bacterial physiology: Life minus Z

Piet A J de Boer  1
Affiliations
Comment

Bacterial physiology: Life minus Z

Piet A J de Boer. Nat Microbiol. .
No abstract available

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Plasticity in E. coli cell shape and proliferation
Wildtype cells (a) contain a peptidoglycan (PG) cell wall (red outline) and grow and divide as rods. The cytoskeletal proteins MreB (actin-like, blue) and FtsZ (tubulin-like, green) play critical roles in elongation and fission of cells, respectively. Walled cells lacking MreB (b) grow as spheres that divide in an FtsZ-dependent manner using the same cytokinetic machinery as rods. When FtsZ is additionally lacking, spheres grow very large and then die (✞). Cells lacking just FtsZ (c) form long filamentous rods that eventually die as well. L-form variants (d) lack PG and are osmotically unstable. On isotonic medium they propagate as pleomorphic cells that divide by membrane extrusion/blebbing, and both MreB and FtsZ are dispensable (and, hence, not indicated in the panel). The new E. coli lifestyle (e) called ‘coli-flower’ (CFL) requires the presence of a PG cell wall and functional MreB, as well as the absence of FtsZ and the PG synthase activity of PBP1B. The additional absence of Lpp and biosynthetic pathways for extracellular polysaccharides (EP's) promote the conversion from rod-shaped (a) or L-form (d) cells to CFL (e), but may be less critical once ‘coli-flowering’ is established. It is attractive to speculate that forebears of extant FtsZ-less bacterial species that have retained a peptidoglycan cell wall survived in a CFL-like manner upon loss of the ftsZ gene.
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