A contractile injection system stimulates tubeworm metamorphosis by translocating a proteinaceous effector
By Charles F. Ericson, Fabian Eisenstein, J. Medeiros, K. Malter, G. Cavalcanti, Robert W. Zeller, D. Newman, M. Pilhofer, Nicholas J. Shikuma. 2019
60 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The swimming larvae of many marine animals identify a location on the sea floor to undergo metamorphosis based on the presence of specific bacteria. Although this microbe–animal interaction is critical for the life cycles of diverse marine animals, what types of biochemical cues from bacteria that induce metamorphosis has been a mystery. Metamorphosis of larvae of the tubeworm Hydroides elegans is induced by arrays of phage tail-like contractile injection systems, which are released by the bacterium Pseudoalteromonas luteoviolacea. Here we identify the novel effector protein Mif1. By cryo-electron tomography imaging and functional assays, we observe Mif1 as cargo inside the tube lumen of the contractile injection system and show that the mif1 gene is required for inducing metamorphosis. Purified Mif1 is sufficient for triggering metamorphosis when electroporated into tubeworm larvae. Our results indicate that the delivery of protein effectors by contractile injection systems may orchestrate microbe–animal interactions in diverse contexts.
Subfields: Ecology, Endocrinology, Molecular Biology
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Citations in the corpus
- The extracellular contractile injection system is enriched in environmental microbes and associates with numerous toxins (2020, methodology): “Mif1 protein was shown as a cargo inside the MACs tube lumen but was not shown to act as a toxin 15 .”