Beyond the scope of this paper, I must highlight how terrific this unique system of obligate symbiosis is, to decipher what are the molecular determinants for bacterial phyllosphere colonization. I have no doubt that this will lead to several major discoveries in the future! 🦠🪴

Now is published a beautiful and short "dispatch" to highlight its main results, and put them in context with the literature
I hope you will enjoy the reading 🙏
www-cell-com.insb.bib.cnrs.fr/current-biol...

The exact role of this scaffold in terms of cellulose organization or modification remain enigmatic, and further work is needed to discover how it impacts cellulose secretion in Proteobacteria Nevertheless, our paper just came out
@CurrentBiology
: www.cell.com/current-biol...

Last but not least, BcsD can form a scaffold with its partner that can further bind to cellulose synthase. I'm not a structuralist myself, but this scaffold does not look like anything else I have seen before (please comment if you have ideas/inputs)

Furthermore, BcsD participate to biofilm architecture, suggesting an active role in cellulose organization during secretion

In our work, we show through #CryoEM that BcsD form tetramers and not octamers (unlike in Gluconacetobacter genus), and that its partner is either BcsP or BcsO

While BcsH is restricted to the Gluconacetobacter genus, BcsD is present in many other Proteobacteria, with very different cellulose operons, which is very intriguing Their role and structure was undefined until recently

However, Gluconacetobacter can secrete crystalline cellulose. In this case, cellulose synthases are attached to the so-called "cortical belt", a cytoskeletal scaffold recently discovered, made of BcsD octamers with BcsH partner
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...