Isolation of differentiated membrane domains from Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium, including a fraction containing attachment sites between the inner and outer membranes and the murein skeleton of the cell envelope.

Cell envelopes of Salmonella typhimurium and Escherichia coli were disrupted in a French pressure cell and fractionated by successive cycles of sedimentation and floatation density gradient centrifugation. This permitted the identification and isolation of several membrane fractions in addition to the major inner membrane and murein-outer membrane fractions. One of these fractions (fraction OML) accounted for about 10% of the total cell envelope protein, and is likely to include the murein-membrane adhesion zones that are seen in electron micrographs of plasmolyzed cells. Fraction OML contained inner membrane, murein, and outer membrane in an apparently normal configuration, was capable of synthesizing murein from UDP-[3H]N-acetylglucosamine and UDP-N-acetylmuramylpentapeptide and covalently linking it to the endogenous murein of the preparation, and showed a labeling pattern in [3H]galactose pulse-chase experiments that was consistent with its acting as an intermediate in the movement of newly synthesized lipopolysaccharide from inner membrane to outer membrane. The fractionation procedure also identified two new minor membrane fractions, with characteristic protein patterns, that are usually included in the region of the major inner membrane peak in other fractionation procedures but can be separated from the major inner membrane fraction and from contaminating flagellar fragments by the subsequent floatation centrifugation steps.