A new preprint from the lab in collaboration with Feng Jiang.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.13.653841v1
This is a thread for you if you're interested in secretion systems, phages, and evolution.
The extracellular contractile injection system (eCIS) is a mysterious microbial toxin delivery system.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.13.653841v1
This is a thread for you if you're interested in secretion systems, phages, and evolution.
The extracellular contractile injection system (eCIS) is a mysterious microbial toxin delivery system.
Comments
An open question in the field is what those tail fibers are, namely the receptor binding proteins.
For example, in the case of two studied eCISs the tail fiber contain an Adenovirus-like shaft.
To find all tail fiber genes and proteins Nimrod wrote a code to iteratively scan all eCIS operons for what look like tail fiber genes. It isn't easy as these genes are rapidly evolving
However, we identified 3,445 eCIS tail fiber proteins found in 2,585 eCIS loci from 1,069 microbes.
We defined 5 new domains that we named eBAPs for "eCIS baseplate anchor protein" that serve as an
Now, the interesteting part happens in the RBP.
We see an enormous diversity over
Each eBAP domain can bind to numerous RBPs.
How many?