Department of Respiratory Medicine, Infectious Diseases and Pathogen Biology Center State Key Laboratory for Diagnosis and Treatment of Severe Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Key Laboratory for Zoonosis Research of the Ministry of Education, The First Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, China
Lidong Wang
Department of Respiratory Medicine, Infectious Diseases and Pathogen Biology Center State Key Laboratory for Diagnosis and Treatment of Severe Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Key Laboratory for Zoonosis Research of the Ministry of Education, The First Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, China
Yiheng Zhu
Department of Respiratory Medicine, Infectious Diseases and Pathogen Biology Center State Key Laboratory for Diagnosis and Treatment of Severe Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Key Laboratory for Zoonosis Research of the Ministry of Education, The First Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, China
Zhengshan Feng
Department of Respiratory Medicine, Infectious Diseases and Pathogen Biology Center State Key Laboratory for Diagnosis and Treatment of Severe Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Key Laboratory for Zoonosis Research of the Ministry of Education, The First Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, China
Qingtian Guan
Bioinformatics Laboratory, The First Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, China
Department of Respiratory Medicine, Infectious Diseases and Pathogen Biology Center State Key Laboratory for Diagnosis and Treatment of Severe Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Key Laboratory for Zoonosis Research of the Ministry of Education, The First Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, China
Department of Respiratory Medicine, Infectious Diseases and Pathogen Biology Center State Key Laboratory for Diagnosis and Treatment of Severe Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Key Laboratory for Zoonosis Research of the Ministry of Education, The First Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, China
Identification of unique essential bacterial genes is important for not only the understanding of their cell biology but also the development of new antimicrobials. Here, we report a previously unrecognized core component of the Acinetobacter baumannii divisome. Our results reveal that the protein, termed Aeg1 interacts with multiple cell division proteins, including FtsN, which is required for components of the divisome to localize to the midcell. We demonstrate that the FtsAE202K and FtsBE65A mutants effectively bypassed the need of Aeg1 by A. baumannii, as did the activation variants FtsWM254I and FtsWS274G. Our results suggest that Aeg1 is a cell division protein that arrives at the division site to initiate cell division by recruiting FtsN, which activates FtsQLB and FtsA to induce the septal peptidoglycan synthase FtsWI. The discovery of the new essential cell division protein has provided a new target for the development of antibacterial agents.
