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Published March 19, 2019 | Supplemental Material + Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Simulations suggest a constrictive force is required for Gram-negative bacterial cell division

Abstract

To divide, Gram-negative bacterial cells must remodel cell wall at the division site. It remains debated, however, whether this cell wall remodeling alone can drive membrane constriction, or if a constrictive force from the tubulin homolog FtsZ is required. Previously, we constructed software (REMODELER 1) to simulate cell wall remodeling during growth. Here, we expanded this software to explore cell wall division (REMODELER 2). We found that simply organizing cell wall synthesis complexes at the midcell is not sufficient to cause invagination, even with the implementation of a make-before-break mechanism, in which new hoops of cell wall are made inside the existing hoops before bonds are cleaved. Division can occur, however, when a constrictive force brings the midcell into a compressed state before new hoops of relaxed cell wall are incorporated between existing hoops. Adding a make-before-break mechanism drives division with a smaller constrictive force sufficient to bring the midcell into a relaxed, but not necessarily compressed, state.

Additional Information

© 2019 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received 01 September 2018; Accepted 28 February 2019; Published 19 March 2019. Code availability: The source code of our simulations is provided as Supplementary Software. Data availability: The data supporting the findings of this study are available within the paper and its Supplementary Information files. We thank Martin Pilhofer for sharing the electron cryotomogram of an E. coli cell shown in Fig. 4, Debnath Ghosal for helpful discussions, and Andrew Jewett for assisting with membrane-tracing software. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grant R35 GM122588 to G.J.J.). Author Contributions: L.T.N. designed and ran simulations and wrote the manuscript. C.M.O. wrote the manuscript. H.J.D. ran simulations and did analysis of electron cryotomograms. M.K., Q.Y., Y.-W.C. and M.B. performed electron cryotomography. G.J.J. designed simulations and wrote the manuscript. The authors declare no competing interests.

Attached Files

Published - s41467-019-09264-0.pdf

Submitted - 406389.full.pdf

Supplemental Material - 41467_2019_9264_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

Supplemental Material - 41467_2019_9264_MOESM2_ESM.pdf

Supplemental Material - 41467_2019_9264_MOESM3_ESM.pdf

Supplemental Material - 41467_2019_9264_MOESM4_ESM.mp4

Supplemental Material - 41467_2019_9264_MOESM5_ESM.zip

Supplemental Material - 41467_2019_9264_MOESM6_ESM.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023