Coarse-Grained Simulations Of Bacterial Cell Wall Growth Reveal That Local Coordination Alone Can Be Sufficient To Maintain Rod Shape

Condensed Matter journal club

Coarse-Grained Simulations Of Bacterial Cell Wall Growth Reveal That Local Coordination Alone Can Be Sufficient To Maintain Rod Shape

  • Event time: 11:30am until 12:30pm
  • Event date: 24th March 2017
  • Location: Room 2511,

Event details

The rod shape of walled bacteria is determined by the peptidoglycan (PG) sacculus, but how rod shape is maintained as cells grow remains a fundamental question in bacterial cell biology. We have developed a coarse-grained modeling method to study rod shape maintenance. Individual PG remodeling enzymes, including transglycosylases, transpeptidases, and endopeptidases, are for the first time, to our knowledge, explicitly modeled to explore how they can coordinate to remodel a sacculus several orders of magnitude larger than the enzymes themselves. Rather than requiring top-down regulation of new PG insertion sites, our work shows that local coordination of the PG remodeling enzymes within discrete complexes can be sufficient to maintain the integrity and rod shape of the sacculus.

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Given the diversity of research in the CM group, chosen topics vary widely. We tend to stick to high-impact journals - Nature, Science, PNAS and PRL have been popular - but this is not prescriptive..

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