Breaking the bilayer: OMV formation during environmental transitions
Authors:Katherine E. Bonnington, Meta J. Kuehn
doi: 10.15698/mic2017.02.558
Volume 4, pp. 64 to 66, published 03/02/2017.
Department of Biochemistry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, USA.
Keywords:
lipid A, outer membrane vesicles, Salmonella.
Corresponding Author(s):
Conflict of interest statement:
None.
Please cite this article as:
Katherine E. Bonnington, Meta J. Kuehn (2017). Breaking the bilayer: OMV formation during environmental transitions. Microbial Cell 4(2): 64-66.
© 2017 Bonnington and Kuehn. 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 reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are acknowledged.
Abstract:
Gram-negative bacteria maintain the barrier properties of the outer membrane (OM) in a wide array of physiological conditions despite their inability to degrade lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and protein material present in the outer leaflet of the OM. Through characterization of the native dynamics of outer membrane LPS change we recently described a mechanism in which these diderm organisms overcome this design flaw. In response to different environmental stimuli Salmonella enterica modulates the export of specific structural variants of lipid A via outer membrane vesicles (OMVs). We proposed that the polymorphic model for regulation of membrane lipid content could largely account for the structural differences between secreted and retained lipid A species. However, differences in OMV production levels and size observed between environmental conditions remain unexplained. Further exploration into the relationship between OMV production level and content specificity may shed light onto the enigmatic mechanisms of OMV formation.