Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus are small, highly motile, gram-negative deltaproteobacteria that prey upon other gram-negative bacteria such as Escherichia coli, Salmonella, and Proteus species. This is accomplished through collision and attachment to prey, followed by invasion and establishment of the predator within the prey periplasm; the prey cell is modified by the predator to form an osmotically stable structure called the bdelloplast. Within the bdelloplast, the predator proceeds to degrade host macromolecules into their constituent monomers and transport them into the growing Bdellovibrio filament, where they are reassembled as required. When the prey cell is exhausted, the filament septates, and progeny Bdellovibrio grow flagella and lyse the prey ghost to escape. The genome sequence of B. bacteriovorus HD100 shows genes encoding a full set of type IV pilus genes dispersed around the chromosome and an incomplete set of genes encoding Flp pili, which are a specific subset of type IVb pili found in diverse bacterial and archaeal species. Moreover, this bacterium is able to produce other family of filaments based on the polymerization of beta-strand rich proteins. Here you have a good example of a crystal structure of the C-terminal beta helix domain of the Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus Bd3182 fibre (PDB code: 8ONC)

#molecularart ... #fiber ... #betastrand ... #bdellovibrio ... #filament ... #polymer ... #xray

Structure rendered with @proteinimaging and depicted with @corelphotopaint