Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University , Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Center for Systems Biology, Harvard University , Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
mBio. 2023 Oct 31;14(5):e0176023. doi: 10.1128/mbio.01760-23. Epub 2023 Sep 28.
In order to grow, bacterial cells must both create and break down their cell wall. The enzymes that are responsible for these processes are the target of some of our best antibiotics. Our understanding of the proteins that break down the wall- cell wall hydrolases-has been limited by redundancy among the large number of hydrolases many bacteria contain. To solve this problem, we identified 42 cell wall hydrolases in and created a strain lacking 40 of them. We show that cells can survive using only a single cell wall hydrolase; this means that to understand the growth of in standard laboratory conditions, it is only necessary to study a very limited number of proteins, simplifying the problem substantially. We additionally show that the ∆40 strain is a research tool to characterize hydrolases, using it to identify three "helper" hydrolases that act in certain stress conditions.
为了生长，细菌细胞必须同时构建和分解细胞壁。负责这些过程的酶是我们一些最好的抗生素的靶标。由于许多细菌中包含大量水解酶的冗余，我们对分解细胞壁的蛋白质（细胞壁水解酶）的了解一直受到限制。为了解决这个问题，我们在 中鉴定了 42 种细胞壁水解酶，并创建了一种缺乏其中 40 种酶的菌株。我们表明，细胞仅使用一种细胞壁水解酶就可以存活；这意味着要了解 在标准实验室条件下的生长，只需要研究非常有限数量的蛋白质，从而大大简化了问题。我们还表明，∆40 菌株是一种用于表征水解酶的研究工具，使用它可以鉴定三种在特定应激条件下起作用的“辅助”水解酶。
