Export of an N-terminal fragment of Escherichia coli flagellin by a flagellum-specific pathway.
Flagellin and several other external components of the bacterial flagellum are thought to be exported, not by the general N-terminal signal peptide-dependent pathway, but by a flagellum-specific pathway involving a central channel in the flagellum itself. We have constructed a variety of mutant alleles of the Escherichia coli flagellin gene. Mutant flagellins with large internal deletions or truncations of their C-terminal region could still be exported, even though they could not assemble into filament. The most extreme example was a fragment containing only the N-terminal 183 residues of the 497-residue wild-type flagellin. This result suggests that the N-terminal region of flagellin contains a signal that enables the protein to be recognized and exported by the flagellum-specific pathway.
Kuwajima
G
G
Shionogi Research Laboratories, Shionogi and Co., Ltd., Osaka, Japan.
Kawagishi
I
I
Homma
M
M
Asaka
J
J
Kondo
E
E
Macnab
R M
RM
D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D001426:Bacterial Proteins / Q000235:genetics*; D001483:Base Sequence; D002872:Chromosome Deletion; D004926:Escherichia coli / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism*; D005407:Flagella / Q000502:physiology; D005408:Flagellin / Q000096:biosynthesis / Q000235:genetics*; D005796:Genes; D005798:Genes, Bacterial; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D009154:Mutation; D010957:Plasmids
D001426:Bacterial Proteins; D005408:Flagellin