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Bacterial physiology

A Fab(H) way of controlling size for E. coli

Nature Reviews Microbiology volume 10, pages 670–671 (2012)Cite this article

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To probe the regulatory mechanisms involved in envelope biogenesis, the authors screened for suppressors of a mutation that renders cells severely deficient in lipopolysaccharide (LPS) transport to the outer membrane, making them non-viable owing to a loss of envelope integrity. One such suppressor was a loss-of-function allele for fabH (a gene involved in the initiation step of FA biosynthesis), resulting in small, slow-growing colonies. Continuing their studies with a fabH deletion strain, the authors found that fabH-null cells had an ∼50% reduction in surface area and an ∼70% reduction in cell volume compared with wild-type cells. The connection between size and FA biosynthesis was confirmed by incubating wild-type cells with cerulerin, an FA elongation inhibitor, as these cells were also small.

To investigate why a lack of FabH allowed LPS transport-defective cells to survive, the authors examined envelope growth (which requires FA biosynthesis), and found that the rate of envelope elongation in fabH-null cells was ∼75% slower than that in wild-type cells. They concluded that the perturbed FA biosynthesis in fabH-null cells decreased cell size and slowed down the growth rate such that, in cells defective for LPS localization, the limited amount of LPS transport that could occur was sufficient to cope with the rate of expansion for the rest of the envelope.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Yao, Z. et al. Regulation of cell size in response to nutrient availability by fatty acid biosynthesis in Escherichia coli. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 20 Aug 2012 (doi:10.1073/pnas.1209742109)

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  1. Lucie Wootton
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Wootton, L. A Fab(H) way of controlling size for E. coli. Nat Rev Microbiol 10, 670–671 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro2886

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro2886

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