Cross talk between DNA replication and LPS biosynthesis during cell growth

细菌无处不在，它们的存在影响着我们的日常生活。他们可以是我们的朋友，通过帮助我们消化肠道中无法获得的营养物质，产生我们呼吸的氧气，降解有毒物质或发酵我们喜欢的食物。它们也可以是我们的敌人，让我们生病或破坏我们的食物。我们接受我们将无限期地与他们共享我们的星球，我们认为最好是非常详细地了解细菌是如何生长的。这些信息将帮助我们更好地选择性地摧毁我们周围的有害细菌，但也可能使我们能够为生物技术或医疗应用设计更有效的细菌菌株。细菌的生命周期由几个步骤组成。首先，细胞需要在生物质中生长，扩大它的外壳，细菌的包膜，并复制它的DNA。所有这些都完成后，细菌细胞开始了我们称之为细胞分裂的过程。在这个过程中，细菌被一分为二，产生了两个单独的细胞，它们拥有为下一代重新开始生长周期所需的一切。这些步骤在增长过程中同时发生，因此它们必须协调一致。然而，细菌细胞如何协调其细胞膜的DNA复制和生长尚不清楚。在研究这个问题时，我们的实验室发现，DNA复制的主要调节者之一Diaa可能是答案。我们已经证明DiaA在基因上与包膜生物发生有关，并在包膜合成中识别代谢物。通过这一建议，我们希望更好地了解DIAA如何与包膜生物发生进行沟通，以协调这两个过程。我们认为对这一过程的详细了解很重要，因为知道这一点可以帮助我们在理想的情况下让细菌生长得更好，或者在不理想的地方减少它们的生长。

Bacteria are everywhere and their presence affects our daily life. They can be our friends, by helping us to digest inaccessible nutrients in our guts, producing the oxygen we breathe, degrading toxic materials or fermenting the foods we love. They can also be our foes by making us sick or spoiling our food. Accepting that we will indefinitely share our planet with them, we think it best to understand in great detail how bacteria grow. This information will help us to get better at selectively destroying the bad bacteria around us, but may also enable us to engineer more efficient bacterial strains for biotechnological or medical applications. The bacterial life cycle consists of several steps. First, cells need to grow in biomass, enlarge its shell, the bacterial envelope and copy its DNA. With all of this completed, the bacterial cells start a process we call cell division. During this process, the bacterium divides in half creating two individual cells that have all it takes to restart their growth cycle for the next generation. These steps happen at the same time during growth, therefore they must be coordinated. However, exactly how bacterial cells coordinate DNA replication and growth of their cell envelopes is not yet known. Studying this question, our laboratory found that one of the master regulators of DNA replication, DiaA, might be the answer. We have shown that DiaA is genetically linked to envelope biogenesis and recognises a metabolite in envelope synthesis. With this proposal we want to better understand how DiaA communicates with envelope biogenesis to coordinate the two processes. We think a detailed understanding of this process is important because knowing this could help us to make bacteria grow better if its desirable, or reduce their growth where it is not.