title: Mechanisms of bacterial morphogenesis: evolutionary cell biology approaches provide new insights.
abstract: How Darwin's "endless forms most beautiful" have evolved remains one of the most exciting questions in biology. The significant variety of bacterial shapes is most likely due to the specific advantages they confer with respect to the diverse environments they occupy. While our understanding of the mechanisms generating relatively simple shapes has improved tremendously in the last few years, the molecular mechanisms underlying the generation of complex shapes and the evolution of shape diversity are largely unknown. The emerging field of bacterial evolutionary cell biology provides a novel strategy to answer this question in a comparative phylogenetic framework. This relatively novel approach provides hypotheses and insights into cell biological mechanisms, such as morphogenesis, and their evolution that would have been difficult to obtain by studying only model organisms. We discuss the necessary steps, challenges, and impact of integrating "evolutionary thinking" into bacterial cell biology in the genomic era.
authors: Department of Biology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA.
authors: Chao
authors: C
authors: Jiang
authors: Paul D
authors: PD
authors: Caccamo
authors: Yves V
authors: YV
authors: Brun
mesh_terms: D001419:Bacteria / Q000166:cytology*; D018407:Bacterial Physiological Phenomena; D005075:Biological Evolution; D003585:Cell Biology; D008954:Models, Biological
keywords: bacterial shape; co-option; evolutionary cell biology; evolutionary developmental biology; evolutionary thinking; morphological transitions; non-model organisms