Collaborative Research: Mechanism of Polarized Budding in Chlamydia

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Understanding the mechanisms underlying the process of cell division is fundamental to defining the rules of life, and this research will determine the events necessary for the polarized division process used by a subset of the bacterial kingdom to generate daughter cells. This collaborative research endeavor will be carried out by investigators from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and it will allow for the training of graduate students at the interface of molecular cell biology and computational biophysics. The research projects at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center will be supported by undergraduate researchers from the Biotechnology Program at Southwest Tennessee Community College (Southwest), who will gain hands-on experience that will contribute toward their degree. In addition to their interactions with each of the investigators on the project, the Southwest students will interact extensively with graduate students who will obtain valuable experience in one-on-one teaching and mentoring. The investigators on this project will also make yearly presentations to all participants in the Biotechnology Program at Southwest to expose all students in the program, many of whom are from underprivileged backgrounds, to career options in the STEM fields. The results generated from these studies will be broadly disseminated and developed as a tool that teachers can access to illustrate to undergraduate students the diversity of cell division processes utilized by members of the bacterial kingdom.Bacteria of the genus Chlamydia divide by a novel process termed polarized budding, as do a subset of the other members of the Planctomycetes-Verrucomicrobiae-Chlamydiae superphylum of bacteria. The bacteria that undergo polarized budding do not express the protein FtsZ, which is critical for the process of binary fission that the vast majority of bacteria use as a mechanism for cell division. The regulatory events that control cell division in FtsZ-less bacteria are not understood, and the studies in this research project will define underlying molecular mechanisms that govern polarized budding. Specifically, the project will define the role of phospholipids in generating changes in membrane curvature that arise in Chlamydia during cell division. The research will also determine the role of phospholipids in regulating the localization of membrane and cytosolic proteins in cells undergoing polarized budding. The project will bring together researchers from multiple institutions with distinct and complementary expertise to define molecular mechanisms that regulate discrete steps in the polarized budding process that Chlamydia use to divide.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.