Auer et al. developed the high-throughput 'GRABS' assay to study cell stiffness. Based on the concept that agarose provides mechanical resistance to cell elongation, GRABS measures the growth, and thus cell stiffness, of agarose-embedded cells in 96-well microplates. In a GRABS screen of 3,844 Escherichia coli deletion mutants, the 46 strongest hits — several of which were validated using a microfluidic bending assay — included not only genes with functions that are related to the cell envelope, as expected, but also 37 genes with other functions, including energy production and conversion; DNA replication, recombination and repair; and amino-acid transport and metabolism. The diversity of these functions suggests that cell stiffness is an emergent property that depends on processes beyond those that maintain the cell envelope.
References
Auer, G. K. et al. Mechanical genomics identifies diverse modulators of bacterial cell stiffness. Cell Syst. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cels.2016.05.006 (2016)
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Attar, N. Cell stiffness beyond the wall. Nat Rev Microbiol 14, 477 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro.2016.101
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro.2016.101