Simulations suggest a constrictive force is required for Gram-negative bacterial cell division

Lam T. Nguyen, Catherine M. Oikonomou, H. Jane Ding, Mohammed Kaplan, Qing Yao, Yi-Wei Chang, Morgan Beeby and Grant J. Jensen ()
Additional contact information
Lam T. Nguyen: California Institute of Technology
Catherine M. Oikonomou: California Institute of Technology
H. Jane Ding: California Institute of Technology
Mohammed Kaplan: California Institute of Technology
Qing Yao: California Institute of Technology
Yi-Wei Chang: California Institute of Technology
Morgan Beeby: California Institute of Technology
Grant J. Jensen: California Institute of Technology

Nature Communications, 2019, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract To divide, Gram-negative bacterial cells must remodel cell wall at the division site. It remains debated, however, whether this cell wall remodeling alone can drive membrane constriction, or if a constrictive force from the tubulin homolog FtsZ is required. Previously, we constructed software (REMODELER 1) to simulate cell wall remodeling during growth. Here, we expanded this software to explore cell wall division (REMODELER 2). We found that simply organizing cell wall synthesis complexes at the midcell is not sufficient to cause invagination, even with the implementation of a make-before-break mechanism, in which new hoops of cell wall are made inside the existing hoops before bonds are cleaved. Division can occur, however, when a constrictive force brings the midcell into a compressed state before new hoops of relaxed cell wall are incorporated between existing hoops. Adding a make-before-break mechanism drives division with a smaller constrictive force sufficient to bring the midcell into a relaxed, but not necessarily compressed, state.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09264-0 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:10:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-019-09264-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-09264-0

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().