A new lysine biosynthetic enzyme from a bacterial endosymbiont shaped by genetic drift and genome reduction.

The effect of population bottlenecks and genome reduction on enzyme function is poorly understood. Candidatus Liberibacter solanacearum is a bacterium with a reduced genome that is transmitted vertically to the egg of an infected psyllid-a population bottleneck that imposes genetic drift and is predicted to affect protein structure and function. Here, we define the function of Ca.

On the utility of microfluidic systems to study protein interactions: advantages, challenges, and applications.

Within the complex milieu of a cell, which comprises a large number of different biomolecules, interactions are critical for function. In this post-reductionist era of biochemical research, the 'holy grail' for studying biomolecular interactions is to be able to characterize them in native environments. While there are a limited number of in situ experimental techniques currently available, there is a continuing need to develop new methods for the analysis of biomolecular complexes that can cope with the additional complexities introduced by native-like solutions.

The First Purification of Functional Proteins from the Unculturable, Genome-Reduced, Bottlenecked α-Proteobacterium 's Liberibacter solanacearum'.

Liberibacter solanacearum' is an unculturable α-proteobacterium that is the causal agent of zebra chip disease of potato-a major problem in potato-growing areas, because it affects growth and yield. Developing effective treatments for ' L. solanacearum' has been hampered by the difficulty in functionally characterizing the proteins of this organism, largely because they are not easily expressed and purified in standard expression systems.