Lateral interactions between protofilaments of the bacterial tubulin homolog FtsZ are essential for cell division
- Zhejiang University, China
- Peking University, China
- Stanford University, United States
Abstract
The prokaryotic tubulin homolog FtsZ polymerizes into protofilaments, which further assemble into higher-order structures at future division sites to form the Z-ring, a dynamic structure essential for bacterial cell division. The precise nature of interactions between FtsZ protofilaments that organize the Z-ring and their physiological significance remain enigmatic. In this study, we solved two crystallographic structures of a pair of FtsZ protofilaments,and demonstrated that they assemble in an antiparallel manner through the formation of two different inter-protofilament lateral interfaces. Our in vivo photocrosslinking studies confirmed that such lateral interactions occur in living cells, and disruption of the lateral interactions rendered cells unable to divide. The inherently weak lateral interactions enable FtsZ protofilaments to self-organize into a dynamic Z-ring. These results have fundamental implications for our understanding of bacterial cell division and for developing antibiotics that target this key process.
Data availability
Diffraction data have been deposited in PDB under the accession code 5ZUE
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China (2016YFA0500404)
- Sheng Ye
Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China (2014CB910300)
- Sheng Ye
Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China (2012CB917300)
- Zengyi Chang
National Natural Science Foundation of China (31525001)
- Sheng Ye
National Natural Science Foundation of China (31430019)
- Sheng Ye
National Natural Science Foundation of China (31670775)
- Zengyi Chang
National Natural Science Foundation of China (31470766)
- Zengyi Chang
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2018, Guan et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Lateral interactions between protofilaments of the bacterial tubulin homolog FtsZ are essential for cell division
eLife 7:e35578.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.35578
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