Team:Toulouse/Project/Chemotaxis

WHAT IS CHEMOTAXIS ?
Chemotaxis is a bacterial function which allows to bacteria to move according a concentration gradient. This system allows bacteria to find better place to growth, the chemotaxis system is very used by bacteria especially for nutritional molecules like sugar, amino acid, vitamins ...

In our case chemotaxis is used as a way to detect and approach fungus. Indeed during its growth, fungi release N-acetylglucosamine, this molecule is the monomer of chitin which is specific to fungal presence. So around fungi there is a gradient of N- acetylglucosamine.

Unfortunately bacillus Subtilis isn’t able to detect such gradient, but bacillus is able to detect and move to sugar like glucose thanks a glucose specific receptor, VcpA. But other bacteria can detect these kind of molecule, for example vibrio cholera, which have a specific receptor for N- acetylglucosamine, VCD.

Therefore, the idea is pretty simple, we switch glucose specificity by N- acetylglucosamine specificity. So we need to modify the extracellular part of VcpA, the part which is responsible of the specificity, by the extracellular part of a N-acetylglucosamine receptor, VCD.

Overview

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