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Flagellin Redundancy in Caulobacter crescentus and Its Implications for Flagellar Filament Assembly

2011; American Society for Microbiology; Volume: 193; Issue: 11 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1128/jb.01172-10

1098-5530

Alexandra Faulds‐Pain, Christopher Birchall, Christine Aldridge, Wendy D. Smith, Giulia Grimaldi, Shuichi Nakamura, Tomoko Miyata, Joe Gray, Guanglai Li, Jay X. Tang, Keiichi Namba, Tohru Minamino, Phillip D. Aldridge,

Protist diversity and phylogeny

ABSTRACT Bacterial flagella play key roles in surface attachment and host-bacterial interactions as well as driving motility. Here, we have investigated the ability of Caulobacter crescentus to assemble its flagellar filament from six flagellins: FljJ, FljK, FljL, FljM, FljN, and FljO. Flagellin gene deletion combinations exhibited a range of phenotypes from no motility or impaired motility to full motility. Characterization of the mutant collection showed the following: (i) that there is no strict requirement for any one of the six flagellins to assemble a filament; (ii) that there is a correlation between slower swimming speeds and shorter filament lengths in Δ fljK Δ fljM mutants; (iii) that the flagellins FljM to FljO are less stable than FljJ to FljL; and (iv) that the flagellins FljK, FljL, FljM, FljN, and FljO alone are able to assemble a filament.