Fig. 2: MreCPa associates head-to-tail through three main conserved regions.
From: Self-association of MreC as a regulatory signal in bacterial cell wall elongation
a Details of the cryo-EM map of an MreC filament; N-termini are aligned along each protofilament, with the flexible N-terminus pointing towards the outside. b The minimal repeating unit that displays all interfaces is shown as a tetramer for simplicity. Key residues studied by mutagenesis are highlighted as sticks. Regions 1, 2, and 3 are highlighted in blue, orange, and red circles, respectively. c Phylogenetic tree of MreC variants in Proteobacteria, highlighting the conservation of the three interaction regions studied in this work. Proteobacterial MreC sequences were aligned using PROMALS3D and a Maximum Likelihood tree was generated using MEGA X. Apolar amino acids (PIFAVLM) in Region 1 are depicted in blue, the Arg in Region 2 is shown in orange and charged (EDRK) and polar (QTSY) amino acids in Region 3 are shown as full or empty red squares, respectively. A and B indicate residue positions within Regions 1 and 3. Note that the highest level of conservation of the three key MreC regions lies within β- and γ-proteobacteria.
