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How bacterial organelles assemble

Scientists are providing the clearest view yet of an intact bacterial microcompartment, revealing at atomic-level resolution the structure and assembly of the organelle’s protein shell.

The work, led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Michigan State University (MSU), will appear in the June 23 issue of the journal Science. They studied the organelle shell of an ocean-dwelling slime bacteria called Haliangium ochraceum.

“It’s pretty photogenic,” said corresponding author Cheryl Kerfeld, a Berkeley Lab structural biologist with a joint appointment as a professor at the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory. “But more importantly, it provides the very first picture of the shell of an intact bacterial organelle membrane. Having the full structural view of the bacterial organelle membrane can help provide important information in fighting pathogens or bioengineering bacterial organelles for beneficial purposes.”

Markus Sutter, Basil Greber, Clement Aussignargues, Cheryl A. Kerfeld. Assembly principles and structure of a 6.5-MDa bacterial microcompartment shell. Science, 2017 DOI: 10.1126/science.aan3289

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