Bacterial flagellation and cell division

Bacterial cell division spirals into control.

D irecting proteins to specific subcellular addresses is a central problem in cell biology. Historically, perhaps because of their general lack of compartmentalized organelles, bacteria were viewed as relatively uniform at the subcellular level. However, with advances in fluorescence microscopy came the realization that bacteria, like their eukaryotic counterparts, segregate their proteins to d...

Examination of bacterial flagellation by dark-field microscopy.

A method is described for visualizing unstained bacterial flagella by dark-field light microscopy. Since individual filaments can be seen, a genus such as Salmonella, which is peritrichously flagellated, can readily be distinguished from a polarly flagellated genus such as Pseudomonas. Polarly flagellated bacteria generally swim much faster than peritrichously flagellated bacteria, and turn by ...

Bacterial Growth and Division

Bacterial Actin and Tubulin Homologs in Cell Growth and Division

In contrast to the elaborate cytoskeletal machines harbored by eukaryotic cells, such as mitotic spindles, cytoskeletal structures detectable by typical negative stain electron microscopy are generally absent from bacterial cells. As a result, for decades it was thought that bacteria lacked cytoskeletal machines. Revolutions in genomics and fluorescence microscopy have confirmed the existence n...

Bacterial growth and cell division: a mycobacterial perspective.

The genus Mycobacterium is best known for its two major pathogenic species, M. tuberculosis and M. leprae, the causative agents of two of the world's oldest diseases, tuberculosis and leprosy, respectively. M. tuberculosis kills approximately two million people each year and is thought to latently infect one-third of the world's population. One of the most remarkable features of the nonsporulat...