セミナー情報

The cell wall is an essential structure for nearly all bacteria, forming a tough outer shell that protects the cell from damage and osmotic lysis. It is the targets for our most effective antibiotics. L-forms are common bacterial variants in which the cell wall is absent, and which have been implicated in a range of infectious diseases of an antibiotic resistant or persistent nature. However, L-forms are difficult to generate reproducibly and research in this area is challenging. Despite their potential importance for understanding antibiotic resistance and pathogenesis, little is known about their basic molecular biology. We recently initiated a project to study L-forms of the Gram positive model bacterium Bacillus subtilis and have developed a tractable system for studying L-forms of this organism. Our key finding was that proliferation of B. subtilis L-forms is completely independent of the FtsZ-ring assembly that is almost universally required for division of walled bacteria. This mechanism may represent a primitive mode of proliferation by cells before the invention of the cell wall, and therefore at the beginning of cell life on earth.
In this seminar, I will present our recent study for understanding the mechanism of L-form growth and proliferation.
[References]
Leaver et al., (2009) Life without a wall or division machine in Bacillus subtilis, Nature 457, 849-53.
Domínguez-Cuevas et al., (2011) The rod to L-form transition of Bacillus subtilis is limited by a requirement for the protoplast to escape from the cell wall sacculus, Mol. Microbiol. In press.