Bacterial flagella grow through an injection-diffusion mechanism.
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Authors
Renault, Thibaud TAbraham, Anthony O
Bergmiller, Tobias
Paradis, Guillaume
Rainville, Simon
Charpentier, Emmanuelle
Guet, Călin C
Tu, Yuhai
Namba, Keiichi
Keener, James P
Minamino, Tohru
Erhardt, Marc

Issue Date
2017-03-06
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The bacterial flagellum is a self-assembling nanomachine. The external flagellar filament, several times longer than a bacterial cell body, is made of a few tens of thousands subunits of a single protein: flagellin. A fundamental problem concerns the molecular mechanism of how the flagellum grows outside the cell, where no discernible energy source is available. Here, we monitored the dynamic assembly of individual flagella using in situ labelling and real-time immunostaining of elongating flagellar filaments. We report that the rate of flagellum growth, initially ∼1,700 amino acids per second, decreases with length and that the previously proposed chain mechanism does not contribute to the filament elongation dynamics. Inhibition of the proton motive force-dependent export apparatus revealed a major contribution of substrate injection in driving filament elongation. The combination of experimental and mathematical evidence demonstrates that a simple, injection-diffusion mechanism controls bacterial flagella growth outside the cell.Citation
Bacterial flagella grow through an injection-diffusion mechanism. 2017, 6 ElifeJournal
eLifePubMed ID
28262091Type
ArticleLanguage
enISSN
2050-084Xae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.7554/eLife.23136
Scopus Count
The following license files are associated with this item:
- Creative Commons
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
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