Porin self-association enables cell-to-cell contact in Providencia stuartii floating communities.
2018
The gram-negative pathogen
Providencia stuartiiforms floating communities within which adjacent cells are in apparent contact, before depositing as canonical surface-attached biofilms. Because
porinsare the most abundant proteins in the outer membrane of gram-negative bacteria, we hypothesized that they could be involved in cell-to-cell contact and undertook a structure-function relationship study on the two
porinsof P. stuartii , Omp-Pst1 and Omp-Pst2. Our crystal structures reveal that these
porinscan self-associate through their extracellular loops, forming dimers of trimers (DOTs) that could enable cell-to-cell contact within floating communities. Support for this hypothesis was obtained by studying the
porin-dependent aggregation of liposomes and model cells. The observation that facing channels are open in the two
porinstructures suggests that DOTs could not only promote cell-to-cell contact but also contribute to intercellular communication.
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