T4P are found across the Bacteria, in both Gram positive and negative species, and are also present in Archea. They are so widespread and diverse that it's thought they were present in the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) of all life on earth. doi.org/10.1371/jour... 3/
A "basal body" machine drives these processes. Electron tomography and sub-tomogram averaging have begun to provide a picture of how this works. This is from a beautiful recent paper from Jun Liu, @dr-lori-burrows.bsky.social and colleagues. doi.org/10.1038/s414... 5/
Unfortunately, we don't have experimentally determined structures of any T4F tip complexes. For example, here is a recent EM tomography model. The tip complex is the purple thing. doi.org/10.1038/s414... 9/
adding my sincere appreciation for this thread and a recent article of ours where TFP play a key role as phage receptor 😉 www.cell.com/current-biol...
Filamentous cheater phages drive bacterial and phage populations to lower fitnessKubota et al. show that bacteria can use their filamentous phage to outcompete other
bacteria, but increased phage production enables the evolution of cheater miniphages
with truncated genomes. Miniph...www.cell.com
I love this paper, and want to add a little nugget from our work on conjugative pilus-dependent phages, in which we found a repeated evolutionary relationship between phages targeting the T4P and T4SS: (two paragraphs, search for T4P, also one of them in FigS3) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Diverse and abundant phages exploit conjugative plasmids - Nature CommunicationsSome phages use plasmid-encoded conjugation proteins as receptors to infect their bacterial hosts, making their host range dependent on horizontal transfer of the plasmid. Here, the authors present a ...www.nature.com
So great. Here's where D. Bradley first inferred that type IV pili retract (the big picture shows phage bound to a phage resistant mutant, which cannot retract its pili). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
@cwhitch.bsky.social later used that strain to identify the gene that encodes the retraction ATPase doi.org/10.1016/0378...
