Recent improvements in bacterial surface display systems coupled with efficient selection and screening strategies are propelling bacterial display systems to the forefront of peptide and protein engineering. The ability to analyze and screen very large protein libraries using cell-sorting instrumentation coupled with the ease of manipulating bacteria provides new capabilities for the protein e...

In this issue, Ng and colleagues describe their outside-in identification of genes involved in the expression of unusual type IV pili in the archaeon Methanococcus maripaludis (13). This intriguing tale, like many in science, hints at chapters not yet written and contains a common theme...expected the unexpected. Prokaryotes, both bacteria and archaea, express a variety of pili, fimbriae, flage...

Expressing proteins of interest as fusions to proteins of the bacterial envelope is a powerful technique with many biotechnological and medical applications. Autotransporters have recently emerged as a good tool for bacterial surface display. These proteins are composed of an N-terminal signal peptide, followed by a passenger domain and a translocator domain that mediates the outer membrane tra...

Surface display technologies have been established previously to select peptides and polypeptides that interact with purified immobilized ligands. In the present study, we designed and implemented a surface display-based technique to identify novel peptide motifs that mediate entry into eukaryotic cells. An Escherichia coli library expressing surface-displayed peptides was combined with eukaryo...

Surface display of heterologous proteins or polypeptides on the surface of bacteria has gained momentum in recent years. Until recently, arrays of anchors or carriers have been identified for displaying diverse passenger proteins on the surface of Escherichia coli, majority of these involving the outer membrane proteins (OMPs). The reason for opting outer membrane proteins lies mainly i n its a...

N-Glycosylation is a post-translational modification common to all three domains of life. In many archaea, the oligosacharyltransferase (AglB)-dependent N-glycosylation of flagellins is required for flagella assembly. However, whether N-glycosylation is required for the assembly and/or function of the structurally related archaeal type IV pili is unknown. Here, we show that of six Haloferax vol...

The Gram-negative bacterial pathogen Neisseria gonorrhoeae is naturally competent for transformation with species-related DNA. We show here that two phase-variable pilus-associated proteins, the major pilus subunit (pilin, or PilE) and PilC, a factor known to function in the assembly and adherence of gonococcal pili, are essential for transformation competence. The PilE and PilC proteins are ne...

Adhesion pili (fimbriae) play a critical role in initiating the events that lead to intestinal colonization and diarrheal disease by enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC), an E. coli pathotype that inflicts an enormous global disease burden. We elucidate atomic structures of an ETEC major pilin subunit, CfaB, from colonization factor antigen I (CFA/I) fimbriae. These data are used to construc...