Cytoplasmic contractile injection systems mediate cell death in Streptomyces.

ABSTRACT: Contractile injection systems (CIS) are bacteriophage tail-like structures that mediate bacterial cell-cell interactions. While CIS are highly abundant across diverse bacterial phyla, representative gene clusters in Gram-positive organisms remain poorly studied. Here we characterize a CIS in the Gram-positive multicellular model organism Streptomyces coelicolor and show that, in contrast to most other CIS, S. coelicolor CIS (CIS^Sc) mediate cell death in response to stress and impact cellular development. CIS^Sc are expressed in the cytoplasm of vegetative hyphae and are not released into the medium. Our cryo-electron microscopy structure enabled the engineering of non-contractile and fluorescently tagged CIS^Sc assemblies. Cryo-electron tomography showed that

SUBMITTER: Casu B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10066040 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature