Systematic functional characterization of new bacterial cell envelope assembly factors

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Bacteria are unicellular organisms surrounded by a complex cell envelope. This envelope is essential for bacterial growth and survival as it delimits the cell and protects it against environmental assaults and changes in osmotic pressure. Many of our most successful antibiotics, including penicillin and vancomycin, target cell envelope assembly. Ironically, most of our knowledge about bacterial cell envelopes has come from using these antibiotics as functional probes. This has no doubt biased and limited our view of these complex and diverse structures, suggesting a need for alternative approaches. Actually very little is known about how envelope assembly is regulated and how the synthesis of the different layers is coordinated.