Structural and Functional Studies of Bacterial Motility and Chemotaxis Proteins

Chemotaxis is the directed motility that allows microbes to sense environmental cues and move towards nutrients and away from toxic chemicals. Microbes have a diverse group of chemoreceptors that sense signals and relay them to the downstream signaling pathways in the cytoplasm. Knowledge derived through the structural and biochemical analysis of the sensing domains of the chemoreceptors would serve as a framework for the structure-guided redesign of receptors to alter their specificity for recognition of and response to novel chemoeffectors with potential applications in biotechnology, agriculture, and medicine.