Global phenotypic profiling identifies a conserved actinobacterial cofactor for a bifunctional PBP-type cell wall synthase
- Harvard Medical School, United States
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard Medical School, United States
Abstract
Members of the Corynebacterineae suborder of Actinobacteria have a unique cell surface architecture and, unlike most well-studied bacteria, grow by tip-extension. To investigate the distinct morphogenic mechanisms shared by these organisms, we performed a genome-wide phenotypic profiling analysis using Corynebacterium glutamicum as a model. A high-density transposon mutagenized library was challenged with a panel of antibiotics and other stresses. The fitness of mutants in each gene under each condition was then assessed by transposon-sequencing. Clustering of the resulting phenotypic fingerprints revealed a role for several genes of previously unknown function in surface biogenesis. Further analysis identified CofA (Cgp_0016) as an interaction partner of the peptidoglycan synthase PBP1a that promotes its stable accumulation at sites of polar growth. The related Mycobacterium tuberculosis proteins were also found to interact, highlighting the utility of our dataset for uncovering conserved principles of morphogenesis for this clinically relevant bacterial suborder.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
Article and author information
Author details
Thomas G Bernhardt
Funding
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (AI083365)
- Thomas G Bernhardt
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (AI132120)
- Joel W Sher
Life Science Research Foundation
- Hoong Chuin Lim
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Thomas G Bernhardt
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2020, Sher 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.
Metrics
-
- 2,470
- views
-
- 402
- downloads
-
- 15
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Citations by DOI
-
- 15
- citations for umbrella DOI https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.54761
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Global phenotypic profiling identifies a conserved actinobacterial cofactor for a bifunctional PBP-type cell wall synthase
eLife 9:e54761.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.54761
