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BACTERIAL PHYSIOLOGY

Pili for nanowires

Nature Microbiology volume 6, pages 1347–1348 (2021)Cite this article

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Extracellular electron transport in Geobacter has long been ascribed to conductive pili. Cryogenic electron microscopy now reveals non-conductive filaments made of pilin-heterodimer subunits. The combined data support a role for Geobacter pili in cytochrome-nanowire secretion instead of conduction.

Using cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), Gu et al.5 now provide the first near-atomic-resolution structure of Geobacter pili. Surprisingly, the filaments were composed of PilA-N–C heterodimers instead of the proposed PilA monomers. PilA-C is encoded by a gene directly downstream of the originally described PilA gene, the product of which is now termed PilA-N for clarity. These 6-nm-diameter PilA-N–C filaments have low extracellular stability, low conductivity, no π−π stacking and are localized in the periplasm, where they apparently facilitate the secretion of OmcS and OmcZ nanowires (Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1: Past and present concepts for the structure and function of Geobacter pili.

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  1. Center for Electromicrobiology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Thomas Boesen, Lars Peter Nielsen & Andreas Schramm

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  1. Thomas Boesen
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  2. Lars Peter Nielsen
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  3. Andreas Schramm
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Correspondence to Andreas Schramm.

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Boesen, T., Nielsen, L.P. & Schramm, A. Pili for nanowires. Nat Microbiol 6, 1347–1348 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-021-00990-0

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