Extracellular vesicles: An emerging platform in gram-positive bacteria

Authors:

Swagata Bose1,#, Shifu Aggarwal1,#, Durg Vijai Singh1,2 and Narottam Acharya1

doi: 10.15698/mic2020.12.737
Volume 7, pp. 312 to 322, published 05/10/2020.

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Affiliations:

1 Department of Infectious Disease Biology, Institute of Life Sciences, Bhubaneswar-751023, India.

2 Department of Biotechnology, School of Earth, Biological and Environmental Sciences, Central  University of South Bihar, Gaya- 824236, India.

# Contributed equally.

Keywords: 

virulence, antibiotic resistance, peptidoglycan, HGT, biofilm, pathogenesis, quorum sensing, immune response, extracellular DNA, vaccine

Corresponding Author(s):

Narottam Acharya, Phone: 91-674-2304278, Fax: 91-674-230 0728; narottam_acharya@ils.res.in; narottam74@gmail.com Durg Vijai Singh, Phone: 91-7978911048; durg_singh@yahoo.co.in; singhdv@ils.res.in; dvsingh@cusb.ac.in

Conflict of interest statement:

Authors declare that they have read the contents of the paper and do not have any competing interests.

Please cite this article as:

Swagata Bose, Shifu Aggarwal, Durg Vijai Singh and Narottam Acharya (2020). Extracellular vesicles: An emerging plat-form in gram-positive bacteria. Microbial Cell 7(12): 312-322. doi: 10.15698/mic2020.12.737

© 2020 Bose et al. This is an open-access article released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduc-tion in any medium, provided the original author and source are acknowledged.

Abstract:

Extracellular vesicles (EV), also known as membrane vesicles, are produced as an end product of secretion by both pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria. Several reports suggest that archaea, gram-negative bacteria, and eukaryotic cells secrete membrane vesicles as a means for cell-free intercellular communication. EVs influence intercellular communication by transferring a myriad of biomolecules including genetic information. Also, EVs have been implicated in many phenomena such as stress response, intercellular competition, lateral gene transfer, and pathogenicity. However, the cellular process of secreting EVs in gram-positive bacteria is less studied. A notion with the thick cell-walled microbes such as gram-positive bacteria is that the EV release is impossible among them. The role of gram-positive EVs in health and diseases is being studied gradually. Being nano-sized, the EVs from gram-positive bacteria carry a diversity of cargo compounds that have a role in bacterial competition, survival, invasion, host immune evasion, and infection. In this review, we summarise the current understanding of the EVs produced by gram-positive bacteria. Also, we discuss the functional aspects of these components while comparing them with gram-negative bacteria.