2

Classic spotlight: 16S rRNA redefines microbiology

The conserved TPR-containing C-terminal domain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa FimV is required for its cAMP-dependent and independent functions

FimV is a Pseudomonas aeruginosa inner membrane protein that regulates intracellular cyclic AMP (cAMP) levels—and thus type IV pilus (T4P)-mediated twitching motility and type II secretion (T2S)—by activating the adenylate cyclase CyaB. Its …

Cache domains that are homologous to, but different from PAS domains comprise the largest superfamily of extracellular sensors in prokaryotes

Cellular receptors usually contain a designated sensory domain that recognizes the signal. Per/Arnt/Sim (PAS) domains are ubiquitous sensors in thousands of species ranging from bacteria to humans. Although PAS domains were described as intracellular …

Establishing precise evolutionary history of a gene improves predicting disease causing missense mutations

Purpose: Predicting the phenotypic effects of mutations has become an important application in clinical genetic diagnostics. Computational tools evaluate the behavior of the variant over evolutionary time and assume that variations seen during the …

Evolutionary genomics suggests that CheV is an additional adaptor for accommodating specific chemoreceptors within the chemotaxis signaling complex

Escherichia coli and Salmonella enterica are models for many experiments in molecular biology including chemotaxis, and most of the results obtained with one organism have been generalized to another. While most components of the chemotaxis pathway …

Joint mouse-human phenome-wide association to test gene function and disease risk

Phenome-wide association is a novel reverse genetic strategy to analyze genome-to-phenome relations in human clinical cohorts. Here we test this approach using a large murine population segregating for ∼5 million sequence variants, and we compare our …

Databases for microbiologists

Databases play an increasingly important role in biology. They archive, store, maintain, and share information on genes, genomes, expression data, protein sequences and structures, metabolites and reactions, interactions, and pathways. All these data …

CDvist: a webserver for identification and visualization of conserved domains in protein sequences

Summary: Identification of domains in protein sequences allows their assigning to biological functions. Several webservers exist for identification of protein domains using similarity searches against various databases of protein domain models. …

Sisters Unbound is required for meiotic centromeric cohesion in Drosophila melanogaster

Regular meiotic chromosome segregation requires sister centromeres to mono-orient (orient to the same pole) during the first meiotic division (meiosis I) when homologous chromosomes segregate, and to bi-orient (orient to opposite poles) during the …

A phenylalanine rotameric switch for signal-state control in bacterial chemoreceptors

Bacterial chemoreceptors are widely used as a model system for elucidating the molecular mechanisms of transmembrane signalling and have provided a detailed understanding of how ligand binding by the receptor modulates the activity of its associated …