Division of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Loma Linda University, Loma Linda CA, USA.
Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.
J Bacteriol. 2019 Sep 20;201(20). doi: 10.1128/JB.00439-19. Print 2019 Oct 15.
Prokaryotic organisms occupy the most diverse set of environments and conditions on our planet. Their ability to sense and respond to a broad range of external cues remain key research areas in modern microbiology, central to behaviors that underlie beneficial and pathogenic interactions of bacteria with multicellular organisms and within complex ecosystems. Advances in our understanding of the one- and two-component signal transduction systems that underlie these sensing pathways have been driven by advances in imaging the behavior of many individual bacterial cells, as well as visualizing individual proteins and protein arrays within living cells. Cryo-electron tomography continues to provide new insights into the structure and function of chemosensory receptors and flagellar motors, while advances in protein labeling and tracking are applied to understand information flow between receptor and motor. Sophisticated microfluidics allow simultaneous analysis of the behavior of thousands of individual cells, increasing our understanding of how variance between individuals is generated, regulated and employed to maximize fitness of a population. experiments have been complemented by the study of signal transduction and motility in complex models, allowing investigators to directly address the contribution of motility, chemotaxis and aggregation/adhesion on virulence during infection. Finally, systems biology approaches have demonstrated previously uncharted areas of protein space in which novel two-component signal transduction pathways can be designed and constructed These exciting experimental advances were just some of the many novel findings presented at the 15 Bacterial Locomotion and Signal Transduction conference (BLAST XV) in January 2019.
原核生物在我们的星球上占据着最多样化的环境和条件。它们感知和响应广泛的外部线索的能力仍然是现代微生物学的主要研究领域，是细菌与多细胞生物以及在复杂生态系统中有益和致病相互作用的基础行为的核心。我们对这些感应途径所基于的一、二组分信号转导系统的理解的进展，是通过对许多单个细菌细胞的行为进行成像，以及对活细胞内的单个蛋白质和蛋白质阵列进行可视化而推动的。冷冻电子断层扫描技术继续为化学感觉受体和鞭毛马达的结构和功能提供新的见解，而蛋白质标记和追踪技术的进步则用于了解受体和马达之间的信息流。复杂的微流控技术允许同时分析数千个单个细胞的行为，从而增加了我们对个体之间的差异是如何产生、调节和利用来最大化种群适应性的理解。这些实验得到了复杂模型中信号转导和运动的研究的补充，使研究人员能够直接解决运动性、趋化性和聚集/黏附在感染过程中的毒力的贡献。最后，系统生物学方法已经展示了蛋白质空间中以前未被发现的区域，在这些区域中可以设计和构建新的二组分信号转导途径。这些令人兴奋的实验进展只是 2019 年 1 月第 15 届细菌运动和信号转导会议（BLAST XV）上提出的许多新发现中的一部分。
