Читать книгу Structure and Function of the Bacterial Genome - Charles J. Dorman - Страница 35

The nucleoid is protected from bisection by the Z ring through a process known as nucleoid occlusion, or NO (Woldringh et al. 1991). If NO fails to occur the result is guillotining of the chromosome, fragmentation of the DNA, and cell death. In E. coli, the DNA‐binding SlmA protein plays a key role in NO through an interaction with FtsZ (Bernhardt and de Boer 2005). SlmA works by interfering with the polymerisation activity of FtsZ, inhibiting Z‐ring formation (Cho, H., et al. 2011). SlmA binds to DNA and to FtsZ simultaneously. Its DNA‐binding sites are distributed around the chromosome, but it does not bind in the Ter macrodomain. The inhibitory activity of SlmA on FtsZ polymerisation outside of Ter is thought to delay septum formation until after the Ter macrodomain has been replicated (Tonthat et al. 2011).