BACTERIA could be hiding skeletons in their closets. Instead of being mere
bags of fluid, many species may have an internal protein framework. “It’s a huge
surprise,” says Jeffery Errington of Oxford University. “A fundamental
difference between bacteria and eukaryotes is supposed to be the lack of a
cytoskeleton.”
His work on the rod-shaped Bacillus subtilis made him suspect that
it was more highly organised than the textbooks say. By using fluorescent
antibodies, his team showed that a protein called MreB forms a ring around the
middle of the cell, while another called MbI forms a central strut (Cell,
vol…
