Mycobacterial outer membrane is a lipid bilayer and the inner membrane is unusually rich in diacyl phosphatidylinositol dimannosides.

ABSTRACT: Mycobacterium species, including the human pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis, are unique among Gram-positive bacteria in producing a complex cell wall that contains unusual lipids and functions as a permeability barrier. Lipids in the cell wall were hypothesized to form a bilayer or outer membrane that would prevent the entry of chemotherapeutic agents, but this could not be tested because of the difficulty in extracting only the cell-wall lipids. We used reverse micellar extraction to achieve this goal and carried out a quantitative analysis of both the cell wall and the inner membrane lipids of Mycobacterium smegmatis. We found that the outer leaflet of the outer membrane contains a similar number of hydrocarbon chains as the inner leaflet composed of mycolic acids covalently linked to

SUBMITTER: Bansal-Mutalik R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3977252 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature