![]() Historically, determining the morphology of bacterial cells has been an important phylogenetic tool. However, much can be learned from comparative studies of morphologically diverse bacteria. ![]() Caulobacter crescentus, a bacterium that undergoes a developmental cycle, has also emerged as a powerful model system to investigate morphogenesis ( England & Gober, 2001 Briegel et al., 2006). Most studies of cell division and morphogenesis have been centered on the two rod-shaped laboratory workhorses: Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis, due mainly to the wide array of genetic tools available to probe the life and death of these organisms ( Errington et al., 2003 Goehring & Beckwith, 2005). The present review aims to integrate older ultra-structural data with recent localization studies, in order to clarify the relation between the mechanisms of cell wall synthesis and the determination of cell shape in various cocci.īacterial division, penicillin-binding proteins, peptidoglycan, murein Introduction While only one peptidoglycan biosynthesis machinery seems to exist in staphylococci, two of these machineries are proposed to function in ovoid-shaped bacteria, reinforcing the intrinsic differences regarding the morphogenesis of different classes of cocci. Interestingly, there seems to be a correlation between the shape of an organism and its set of penicillin-binding proteins – the enzymes that assemble the peptidoglycan, the main constituent of the cell wall. While staphylococci or Neisseria cells, for example, are truly round-shaped, streptococci, lactococci or enterococci have an ovoid shape. Even among genera with the suffix ‘cocci’, which are the focus of this review, different shapes exist. ![]() The shape of bacteria is determined by their cell wall and can be very diverse.
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