Abstract
Since the mechanosensitive channel MscCG has been identified as the major glutamate efflux system in Corynebacterium glutamicum, studies of mechanotransduction processes in this bacterium have helped to unpuzzle a long-unresolved mystery of glutamate efflux that has been utilised for industrial monosodium glutamate production. The patch clamp recording from C. glutamicum giant spheroplasts revealed the existence of three types of mechanosensitive (MS) channels in the cell membrane of this bacterium. The experiments demonstrated that the MS channels could be activated by membrane tension, indicating that the channel gating by mechanical force followed the “Force-From-Lipids (FFL)” principle characteristic of ion channels inherently sensitive to transbilayer pressure profile changes in the mechanically stressed membrane bilayer. Mechanical properties of the C. glutamicum membrane are characteristics of very soft membranes, which in the C. glutamicum membrane are due to negatively charged lipids as its exclusive constituents. Given that membrane lipids are significantly altered during the fermentation process in the monosodium glutamate production, MS channels seem to respond to changes in force transmission through the membrane bilayer due to membrane lipid dynamics. In this review, we describe the recent results describing corynebacterial FFL-dependent mechanosensation originating from the particular lipid composition of the C. glutamicum membrane and unique structure of MscCG-type channels.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the Japanese Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) for a fellowship to YN and the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia for a Principal Research Fellowship to BM.
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YN and BM wrote the manuscript. YN, HK, KH, and BM contributed to editing.
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Yoshitaka Nakayama declares that he has no conflict of interest. Ken-ichi Hashimoto declares that he has no conflict of interest. Hisashi Kawasaki declares that he has no conflict of interest. Boris Martinac declares that he has no conflict of interest.
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This article is part of a Special Issue dedicated to the ‘2018 Joint Conference of the Asian Biophysics Association and Australian Society for Biophysics’ edited by Kuniaki Nagayama, Raymond Norton, Kyeong Kyu Kim, Hiroyuki Noji, Till Böcking, and Andrew Battle
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Nakayama, Y., Hashimoto, Ki., Kawasaki, H. et al. “Force-From-Lipids” mechanosensation in Corynebacterium glutamicum. Biophys Rev 11, 327–333 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12551-019-00524-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12551-019-00524-3