Wang Xindan, Reyes-Lamothe Rodrigo, Sherratt David J
Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, UK.
Biochem Soc Trans. 2008 Aug;36(Pt 4):749-53. doi: 10.1042/BST0360749.
An ongoing mission for biologists is to probe the molecular nature of cellular processes within live cells. Although much of what we have discovered during the molecular biology revolution of the last 50 years has been achieved by exploiting bacteria as 'bags of DNA and proteins', relatively little has been learnt about how they organize their life processes within cells. The mistaken perception of bacteria cells as unstructured systems arose partly because of the difficulty of performing studies by light microscopy due to their small size (many of them having cell lengths a few times bigger than the wavelength of visible light). With the opportunities provided by a range of new fluorophores and by new microscopic techniques, a revolution in bacterial cell biology is revealing unimagined organization in the bacterial cell. We review the development and exploitation of new visualization methods and reagents and show how they are contributing to the understanding of bacterial structure, chromosome organization, DNA metabolism and their relationship to the cell cycle.
生物学家当前的一项任务是探究活细胞内细胞过程的分子本质。尽管在过去50年的分子生物学革命期间，我们所发现的许多成果都是通过将细菌当作“DNA和蛋白质的袋子”来利用而取得的，但对于它们如何在细胞内组织其生命过程，我们了解得相对较少。将细菌细胞错误地视为无结构系统，部分原因在于由于其体积小（许多细菌细胞长度仅比可见光波长几倍大一点），利用光学显微镜进行研究存在困难。随着一系列新型荧光团和新显微镜技术带来的机遇，细菌细胞生物学的一场革命正在揭示细菌细胞中难以想象的组织结构。我们回顾了新可视化方法和试剂的开发与应用，并展示了它们如何有助于理解细菌结构、染色体组织、DNA代谢及其与细胞周期的关系。
