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- Title
CozEa and CozEb play overlapping and essential roles in controlling cell division in Staphylococcus aureus.
- Authors
Stamsås, Gro Anita; Myrbråten, Ine Storaker; Straume, Daniel; Salehian, Zhian; Veening, Jan‐Willem; Håvarstein, Leiv Sigve; Kjos, Morten
- Abstract
Summary: Staphylococcus aureus needs to control the position and timing of cell division and cell wall synthesis to maintain its spherical shape. We identified two membrane proteins, named CozEa and CozEb, which together are important for proper cell division in S. aureus. CozEa and CozEb are homologs of the cell elongation regulator CozESpn of Streptococcus pneumoniae. While cozEa and cozEb were not essential individually, the ΔcozEaΔcozEb double mutant was lethal. To study the functions of cozEa and cozEb, we constructed a CRISPR interference (CRISPRi) system for S. aureus, allowing transcriptional knockdown of essential genes. CRISPRi knockdown of cozEa in the ΔcozEb strain (and vice versa) causes cell morphological defects and aberrant nucleoid staining, showing that cozEa and cozEb have overlapping functions and are important for normal cell division. We found that CozEa and CozEb interact with and possibly influence localization of the cell division protein EzrA. Furthermore, the CozE‐EzrA interaction is conserved in S. pneumoniae, and cell division is mislocalized in cozESpn‐depleted S. pneumoniae cells. Together, our results show that CozE proteins mediate control of cell division in S. aureus and S. pneumoniae, likely via interactions with key cell division proteins such as EzrA. Cell division in Staphylococcus aureus must be controlled in such a way that each division cycle results in two identical, spherical daughter cells. In this work, we use CRISPRi transcriptional knockdowns to demonstrate that two membrane proteins, CozEa and CozEb, work together to control cell division and morphology of spherical staphylococcal cells.
- Subjects
STAPHYLOCOCCUS aureus; CELL division; BACTERIAL cell walls; STREPTOCOCCUS pneumoniae; CELL morphology; BACTERIA
- Publication
Molecular Microbiology, 2018, Vol 109, Issue 5, p615
- ISSN
0950-382X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/mmi.13999