Biomedical Letters

Methods adapted for visualization of bacterial divisome structure and protein-protein interactions

Islam Ud Din Khan*

School of Life Sciences, Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot 010021, China

Abstract

Visualization of dynamic protein structures in live cells is important to recognize the pathways regulating biological processes. This review offers a concrete introduction to various approaches such as cryo-ET, bimolecular fluorescence complement (BiFC), photoactivatable localization (PALM), bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET), structured illumination microscopy (SIM), FRET, and other techniques from the perspective of microbiological research. Super-resolution approaches are especially powerful and ideal for discovering details of small sizes of bacterial cells, which are not solvable by using traditional fluorescence light microscope. The procedure involved behind the applications of all these methods and their current use in microbiology have described here. The objective of this review is to guide researchers to pick out a suitable approach for their microbiological systems. Recent development and more precision of super resolution imaging techniques have widened our knowledge about the bacterial cytoskeleton, cell division proteins and their localization to divisome. The combination of super resolution microscopy techniques with genetic and biochemical methods would more explain the divisome role that divides bacterial cells and explore the protein-protein interactions that govern this mechanism.