Building a flagellum in biological outer space
Authors:Lewis D. B. Evans, Colin Hughes and Gillian M. Fraser
doi: 10.15698/mic2014.01.128
Volume 1, pp. 64 to 66, published 25/01/2014.
Department of Pathology, University of Cambridge, Tennis Court Road, Cambridge, CB2 1QP, United Kingdom.
Keywords:
bacterial flagella, chain mechanism, Type III export, rotary nanomachine, cell motility.
Corresponding Author(s):
Conflict of interest statement:
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Please cite this article as:
Lewis D. B. Evans, Colin Hughes and Gillian M. Fraser (2014). Building a flagellum in biological outer space. Microbial Cell 1(2): 64-66
© 2014 Ewans et al. This is an open-access article released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license, which allows readers to twist, trans-form, or build upon the article and then distribute the resulting work non-commercially, as long as they credit the original authors and license their new creations un-der the identical terms.
Abstract:
Flagella, the rotary propellers on the surface of bacteria, present a paradigm for how cells build and operate complex molecular ‘nanomachines’. Flagella grow at a constant rate to extend several times the length of the cell, and this is achieved by thousands of secreted structural subunits transiting through a central channel in the lengthening flagellum to incorporate into the nascent structure at the distant extending tip. A great mystery has been how flagella can assemble far outside the cell where there is no conventional energy supply to fuel their growth. Recent work published by Evans et al. [Nature (2013) 504: 287-290], has gone some way towards solving this puzzle, presenting a simple and elegant transit mechanism in which growth is powered by the subunits themselves as they link head-to-tail in a chain that is pulled through the length of the growing structure to the tip. This new mechanism answers an old question and may have resonance in other assembly processes.