Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology Commons^™

Uncovering The Roles And Evolved Sequence Grammar Of Hypervariable Intrinsically Disordered Proteins In Bacterial Cell Division, Megan Cohan

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Across all domains of life, a defining hallmark of the onset of cell division is the formation of a cytokinetic ring at the center of the cell. Cell division is a tightly controlled process that involves various regulatory factors that modulate the assembly of the cytokinetic ring. In rod-shaped bacteria, the ring is termed the Z-ring after the protein FtsZ, which is foundational to ring formation and is the bacterial homolog of tubulin. Like tubulin, FtsZ is an assembling GTPase, where GTP binding promotes the cooperative assembly into FtsZ polymers that laterally associate to form bundles. While the GTPase domain …