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Investigations Into the Relationship Between Metabolism and Morphogenesis In Bacillus subtilis
Abstract
Bacterial cell morphology plays important roles in nutrient absorption, cell growth, and pathogenesis, so understanding the determinants of morphology has the potential to significantly improve bioproduction, drug design and human health. Morphology is ultimately determined by synthesis of the cell envelope. Envelope synthesis requires that communication and feedback take place amongst the environment, cellular metabolism, and the envelope synthesis machinery. I made the observation that B. subtilis cell length can vary independent of growth rate when availability of the nutrient Mg2+ is varied. In Chapter II I show that cells divide more frequently when Mg2+ is in excess and provide evidence that Mg2+ may modulate the availability of the peptidoglycan (PG) precursor undecaprenyl phosphate (Und-P). In Chapter III, I investigate metabolic organization and show that a previously uncharacterized enzyme, YisK, localizes to a component of the cell envelope synthesizing machinery, Mbl. In addition, I characterize YisK and demonstrate it can catalyze decarboxylation of oxaloacetate to pyruvate. For my final chapter I discuss the issue of utilizing undefined media for physiological studies and describe the development of an optimized medium and metabolic reporter system to aid future investigations into understanding the coordination amongst nutrient availability, cellular metabolism, and cell growth in live cells. In total, this work represents my efforts to investigate how cells integrate available nutrients with metabolism to instruct the cell envelope synthesis machinery.
Citation
Guo, Tingfeng (2022). Investigations Into the Relationship Between Metabolism and Morphogenesis In Bacillus subtilis. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /198679.