Previous studies have implicated the obligatory requirement for the vir regulon (or "virulon") of the Ti plasmid for the transfer of oncogenes from Agrobacterium tumefaciens to plant cells. The machinery used in this horizontal gene transfer has been long thought to be a transformation or conjugative delivery system. Based on recent protein sequence comparisons, the proteins encoded by the virB...

Pili are hair-like structures protruding from the cell envelope of bacterial cells. Here, we describe the conditional and differential display of PilA-type pili, and PilE and PilF proteins, encoded from pilin gene cluster 1 at the surface of a hospital-acquired Enterococcus faecium bloodstream isolate (E1165) and a community-derived stool isolate (E1039), at two different temperatures. Both str...

Studies of gonococcal pilus biogenesis are fundamental to understanding organelle structure/function relationships and identifying new approaches to controlling disease. This area of research is also relevant to elucidating the basic mechanisms of outer membrane translocation of macromolecules, which requires components highly related to those involved in type IV pilus expression. Previous stud...

Type IVa pili are protein filaments essential for virulence in many bacterial pathogens; they extend and retract from the surface of bacterial cells to pull the bacteria forward. The motor ATPase PilB powers pilus assembly. Here we report the structures of the core ATPase domains of Geobacter metallireducens PilB bound to ADP and the non-hydrolysable ATP analogue, AMP-PNP, at 3.4 and 2.3 Å reso...

Pilus biogenesis and substrate transport by type IV secretion systems require energy, which is provided by three molecular motors localized at the base of the secretion channel. One of these motors, VirB11, belongs to the superfamily of traffic ATPases, which includes members of the type II secretion system and the type IV pilus and archaeal flagellar assembly apparatus. Here, we report the fun...

Adhesive chaperone-usher pili are long, supramolecular protein fibers displayed on the surface of many bacterial pathogens. The type 1 and P pili of uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC) play important roles during urinary tract colonization, mediating attachment to the bladder and kidney, respectively. The biomechanical properties of the helical pilus rods allow them to reversibly uncoil in re...

Pili have been observed on the surface of several gram-positive bacteria, including Streptococcus pneumoniae. The S. pneumoniae strain TIGR4 pilus is composed of three structural subunit proteins encoded in the rlrA pathogenicity islet, RrgA, RrgB, and RrgC. RrgB comprises the pilus backbone, RrgA is observed at intervals along surface pili, while RrgC is found in a loosely defined relationship...

A noticeable genomic feature of many piliated Gram-positive bacterial species is the presence of more than one pilus-encoding operon. Paradigmatically, the gut-adapted Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG strain contains two different fimbrial operons in its genome. However, whereas one of these operons (called spaCBA) is encoding for the functionally mucus-/collagen-binding SpaCBA pilus, for the other o...

The assembly of pili on the cell wall of Gram-positive bacteria requires transpeptidase enzymes called sortases. In Streptococcus agalactiae, the PI-1 pilus island of strain 2603V/R encodes two pilus-specific sortases (SrtC1 and SrtC2) and three pilins (GBS80, GBS52 and GBS104). Although either pilus-specific sortase is sufficient for the polymerization of the major pilin, GBS80, incorporation ...

UNLABELLED Pilus operons encode a pivotal host-microbe interaction structure that is vital for pathogenicity, colonization and adhesion. LOCP is a computational tool to quickly test whether or not the genome of a gram-positive bacterium of interest or some DNA-contig in a metagenomic sample hold pilus operons. Predictions are made based on distinctive motifs of pilus-related protein sequences a...