A new type of organelle in bacteria?
Only recently have scientists upgraded their view of bacteria from “bags of molecules” to organisms with subcellular organization. Our work has revealed that phase separation provides an compartmentalization strategy to organize mRNA decay and signal transduction biochemistry in the bacterial cytoplasm. These studies combined with others indicate that bacteria leverage this phenomena for the formation of a different kind of organelle to organize biochemistry - a membraneless organelle. We are currently testing the breadth that bacteria leverage liquid-liquid phase separation, examining its impact on enzyme kinetics and designing synthetic membraneless organelles. |
A biomolecular condensate regulates a cell fate-determining signaling protein
We identified that the scaffolding protein, PodJ, forms a biomolecular condensate that organizes cell-fate determining kinase clients at the cell poles. Through in vitro reconstitution and synthetic biology approaches, we found that PodJ regulates the localization and activity of the enzyme PleC. Our studies have revealed that a biomolecular condensate serves as a signal to stimulate PleC’s kinase-to-phosphatase switch. This enables spatial regulation of PleC needed for C. crescentus to divide asymmetrically.
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