R Bodies: Membrane-Rupturing Microscopic Tools
Type
Blog Post
... can rupture E. coli spheroplasts to release encapsulated proteins. Video by ACS. For a more cartoony ...thousands of times by propagating through an enormous lattice of identical subunits.
A brief history of R bodies...coli in the 1980s (Kanabrocki et al 1986). Much later, it was shown that putting the operon under a strong...mutants that couldn’t extend at a normal pH and later realized that these mutations clustered in a particular...their ability to penetrate other barriers (like vasculature or extracellular matrices) in response to pH ... response to environmental conditions.
More speculatively, R bodies might endow divergent organisms with...Protein Piston That Breaks Membranes to Release Encapsulated Cargo. ACS Synth. Biol. (2016). doi:10.1021/...