P pili are important adhesive fibres that are assembled by the conserved chaperone-usher pathway. During pilus assembly, the subunits are incorporated into the growing fibre by the donor-strand exchange mechanism, whereby the beta-strand of the chaperone, which complements the incomplete immunoglobulin fold of each subunit, is displaced by the amino-terminal extension of an incoming subunit in ...

Natural genetic transformation is widely distributed in bacteria and generally occurs during a genetically programmed differentiated state called competence. This process promotes genome plasticity and adaptability in Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria. Transformation requires the binding and internalization of exogenous DNA, the mechanisms of which are unclear. Here, we report the discov...

Intragenic recombination between the single complete pilin gene (expression locus) and multiple, distinct, partial pilin gene copies (silent, storage loci) is thought to account for the generation of pilus antigenic diversity and piliation phase (on-off) changes exhibited by Neisseria gonorrhoeae. The mechanisms operating in the genomic rearrangements associated with these forms of pilus variat...

The reactivity of anti-pilus antibodies to native and denatured Haemophilus influenzae b (Hib) pili was studied using rabbit serum prepared against piliated H. influenzae b strain M43 (p+) and adsorbed with its non-piliated variant, strain M42 (p-). The specificity of the adsorbed serum for Hib pili was documented by immunogold electron microscopy and by immunoprecipitation, which revealed the ...

Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi and some strains (Vi+) of serovar Dublin use type IVB pili to facilitate bacterial self-association, but only when the PilV proteins (potential minor pilus proteins) are not synthesized. Pilus-mediated self-association may be important in the pathogenesis of enteric fever. We have shown previously that the extent of DNA supercoiling controls the rate of Rci-cat...

Myxococcus xanthus is a Gram-negative bacterium with a complex life cycle that includes vegetative swarming and fruiting-body formation. Social (S)-motility (coordinated movement of large cell groups) requires both type IV pili and fibrils (extracellular matrix material consisting of polysaccharides and protein). Little is known about the role of this extracellular matrix, or fibril material, i...

Pili have only been discovered in the major Gram-positive pathogens in the past decade and they have been found to play an important role in colonisation and virulence. Pili have been shown to have many important functions including attachment to host tissues, mediating bacterial aggregation, biofilm formation and binding to proteins in the extracellular matrix. In this study, sortase-dependent...

Molecular chaperones are found in the cytoplasm of bacteria and in various cellular compartments in eukaryotes to maintain proteins in nonnative conformations that permit their secretion across membranes or assembly into oligomeric structures. Virtually nothing, however, has been reported about a similar requirement for molecular chaperones in the periplasm of Gram-negative bacteria. We used th...

Type IV pili are important for microcolony formation, biofilm formation, twitching motility, and attachment. We and others have shown that type IV pili are important for protein secretion across the outer membrane, similar to type II secretion systems. This study explored the relationship between protein secretion and pilus formation in Vibrio cholerae. The toxin-coregulated pilus (TCP), a type...

Type IV pili (T4P) and T2SS (Type II Secretion System) pseudopili are filaments extending beyond microbial surfaces, comprising homologous subunits called "pilins." In this paper, we presented a new approach to predict pseudo atomic models of pili combining ambiguous symmetric constraints with sparse distance information obtained from experiments and based neither on electronic microscope (EM) ...