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Pictured: Dr.
Credit: Dan Addison |, University of Virginia's School of Communications
Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and their collaborators solved a decades-long mystery
about how E.
Bacteria propel themselves forward by rolling long, wire-like appendages into the shape of a corkscrew, like a makeshift propeller
.
An international team led by Dr.
Egelman, from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the University of Virginia, said: "While models of how these fibers form regular curly shapes have been around for 50 years, we have now identified the atomically detailed structure
of these fibers.
Bacterial "super coil"
Different bacteria have one or more accessory parts, called flagella, which are made up of thousands of subunits, but all of them are exactly the same
.
Using cryo-electron microscopy, Egelman and his team found that the proteins that make up flagella can exist
in 11 different states.
It is already known that propellers in bacteria are very different
from similar propellers used by healthy single-celled organisms known as archaea.
Egelman and his colleagues examined the flagella of an archaea with cryoelectron microscopy, and Saccharolobus islandicus found that the proteins that form flagella exist
in 10 different states.
"Just like birds, bats and bees, they all evolved their own wings to fly, and the evolution of bacteria and archaea converged on a similar swimming method," Egelman said
.
Original:
Convergent evolution in the supercoiling of prokaryotic flagellar filaments
