New light on bacterial microcompartments

Bacteria contain "microcompartments," which are poorly understood organelles that play critical roles in metabolism. Understanding how they work may ultimately enable engineering them for useful applications. In salmonella, which possess two microcompartment types, coexpression is prevented by gene regulation. Concurrent expression rendered them nonfunctional, and resulted in release of toxic metabolic intermediates into the cell cytoplasm, damaging the cell. But by engineering a regulatory override, Thomas Bobik, PhD, and collaborators shed new light on how microcompartments work. The research is published in the Journal of Bacteriology, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology.

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