Elucidation of the structure of a YD-repeat containing virulence protein from the chronic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Overview

This project aimed to contribute to our understanding of why certain bacteria, particularly ones that cause chronic infections in patients with the genetic disease cystic fibrosis, can persist for so long. It follows on some research conducted on a family of proteins that appear to be involved in allowing bacteria to stick to other cells or even kill other cells using a toxin presented at the tip of the protein – a toxin on a 'stick'. Computational and experimental methods were used to try and determine what the repeating elements that are believed to make up this 'stick' looked like and to learn more about what their function is.

The project was successful in characterising the structures of selected YD-repeat regions of bacterial proteins. However, the conclusion is that they are unstructured, and although this is an important discovery, to prove that this is not an artefact requires further work on larger YD-protein repeats. As part of this work significant progress was made in the analysis of Rhs proteins in bacteria (which contain YD-repeats) and a paper is in preparation on this computationally-based analysis.