Cell Wall Damage Reveals Spatial Flexibility in Peptidoglycan Synthesis and a Nonredundant Role for RodA in Mycobacteria
Emily S. Melzer, Takehiro Kado, Alam García‐Heredia, Kuldeepkumar Ramnaresh Gupta, Xavier Méniche, Yasu S. Morita, Christopher M. Sassetti, E. Hesper Rego, M. Sloan Siegrist
Abstract
Peptidoglycan synthesis is a highly successful target for antibiotics. The pathway has been extensively studied in model organisms under laboratory-optimized conditions. In natural environments, bacteria are frequently under attack. Moreover, the vast majority of bacterial species are unlikely to fit a single paradigm of cell wall assembly because of differences in growth mode and/or envelope structure. Studying cell wall synthesis under nonoptimal conditions and in nonstandard species may improve our understanding of pathway function and suggest new inhibition strategies. Mycobacterium smegmatis, a relative of several notorious human and animal pathogens, has an unusual polar growth mode and multilayered envelope. In this work, we challenged M. smegmatis with cell wall-damaging enzymes to characterize the roles of cell wall-building enzymes when the bacterium is under attack.