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FtsZ
Additional recommended knowledgeDiscovery of the bacterial cytoskeleton is fairly recent. FtsZ was the first protein of the prokaryotic cytoskeleton to be identified. In 1991 it was shown by Erfei Bi and Joseph Lutkenhaus that FtsZ assembled into the Z-ring. During cell division, FtsZ is the first protein to move to the division site, and is essential for recruiting other proteins that produce a new cell wall between the dividing cells. FtsZ's role in cell division is analogous to that of actin in eukaryotic cell division, but unlike the actin-myosin ring in eukaryotes, FtsZ has no known motor protein associated with it. The origin of the cytokinetic force thus remains unclear, but it is believed that the localized synthesis of new cell wall produces at least part of this force. How the roles of tubulin-like proteins and actin-like proteins in cell division became reversed is an evolutionary mystery, but the use of the FtsZ ring in dividing chloroplasts and some mitochondria further establishes their prokaryotic ancestry. Much is known about the dynamic polymerization activities of tubulin and microtubules, but little is known about these activities in FtsZ. While it is known that single-stranded tubulin protofilaments form into 13 stranded microtubules, the multistranded structure of the FtsZ containing Z-ring is not known. Furthermore, there has been a controversy over the apparent cooperativity of single-stranded FtsZ polymer assembly since all established theoretical models for cooperative assembly require multistranded polymers. Recently, Alex Dajkovic and Joe Lutkenhaus have proposed that cooperativity in assembly of FtsZ could be caused by multiple states of FtsZ monomers with differing affinites for each other. Recently proteins similar to tubulin and FtsZ have been discovered in large plasmids found in Bacillus species. They are believed to function as components of segrosomes, which are multiprotein complexes that partition chromosomes/plasmid in bacteria. The plasmid homologs of tubulin/FtsZ seem to have conserved the ability to polymerize into filaments.
References
Categories: Proteins | Cytoskeleton |
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "FtsZ". A list of authors is available in Wikipedia. |