Fig. 3: Loss of wide pili is not compensated by an increase in the narrow form.
3D views of cell poles with assembled T4P in (a) WT and (b) pilA5::kat mutant cells. Blue arrows indicate piliated T4P complexes and orange arrows indicate non-piliated complexes. The outer membrane is shown in purple and the cytoplasmic membrane in yellow. c Quantification of wide and narrow pili assembled on wild-type and pilA5:kat mutant cells. Values are presented as mean +/− standard error of the mean. n = 3 biological replicates per strain, with a minimum of 35 cell poles counted per replicate. These data were previously part of a larger data set in Supplementary Fig. 3c of our earlier work8 and are presented here to corroborate the imaging data in (a, b). The article was licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). d Scatter plot showing the percentage of cell poles expressing 0–20 pili. PilA4 (wide T4P) only expressing cells in the pilA5::kat mutant are shown in teal, and WT cells (wide and narrow T4P) in pink.
