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Journal of Bacteriology, November 1999, p. 7043-7051, Vol. 181, No. 22
Department of Microbiology and Immunology,
Loyola University Medical Center, Maywood, Illinois 60153
Received 24 May 1999/Accepted 3 September 1999
The Bacillus subtilis spore is encased in a resilient,
multilayered proteinaceous shell, called the coat, that protects it from the environment. A 181-amino-acid coat protein called CotE assembles into the coat early in spore formation and plays a
morphogenetic role in the assembly of the coat's outer layer. We have
used a series of mutant alleles of cotE to identify regions
involved in outer coat protein assembly. We found that the insertion of a 10-amino-acid epitope, between amino acids 178 and 179 of CotE, reduced or prevented the assembly of several spore coat proteins, including, most likely, CotG and CotB. The removal of 9 or 23 of the
C-terminal-most amino acids resulted in an unusually thin outer coat
from which a larger set of spore proteins was missing. In contrast, the
removal of 37 amino acids from the C terminus, as well as other
alterations between amino acids 4 and 160, resulted in the absence of a
detectable outer coat but did not prevent localization of CotE to the
forespore. These results indicate that changes in the C-terminal 23 amino acids of CotE and in the remainder of the protein have different
consequences for outer coat protein assembly.
0021-9193/99/$04.00+0
Copyright © 1999, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.
Functional Regions of the Bacillus
subtilis Spore Coat Morphogenetic Protein CotE
*
Corresponding author. Mailing address: Department of
Microbiology and Immunology, Loyola University Medical Center, 2160 South First Ave., Maywood, IL 60153. Phone: (708) 216-3706. Fax: (708) 216-9574. E-mail address: adriks{at}luc.edu.
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