In situ Probing of Newly Synthesized Peptidoglycan in Live Bacteria with Fluorescent D-Amino Acids.

By Erkin Kuru, H. Velocity Hughes, Pamela J. B. Brown, Edward Hall, Srinivas Tekkam, Felipe Cava, M. de Pedro, Y. Brun, Michael S. VanNieuwenhze. Angewandte Chemie, 2012

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Tracking a bug’s life: We describe the first direct and universal approach for labeling peptidoglycan (PG) of diverse bacteria by exploiting the surprising tolerance of cells for incorporating unnatural D-amino acids of various sizes and functionalities. These non-toxic D-amino acids preferably label the sites of active PG synthesis, enabling fine spatiotemporal tracking of cell wall dynamics in phylogenetically and morphologically diverse bacteria.

Subfields: Ecology, Genetics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/56c81f39b7096b860e81b6708fc7e24b22569b2c