Salinity-Dependent Impacts of ProQ, Prc, and Spr Deficiencies on Escherichia coli Cell Structure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ProQ is a cytoplasmic protein with RNA chaperone activities that reside in FinO- and Hfq-like domains. Lesions at proQ decrease the level of the osmoregulatory glycine betaine transporter ProP. Lesions at proQ eliminated ProQ and Prc, the periplasmic protease encoded by the downstream gene prc. They dramatically slowed the growth of Escherichia coli populations and altered the morphologies of E. coli cells in high-salinity medium. ProQ and Prc deficiencies were associated with different phenotypes. ProQ-deficient bacteria were elongated unless glycine betaine was provided. High-salinity cultures of Prc-deficient bacteria included spherical cells with an enlarged periplasm and an eccentric nucleoid. The nucleoid-containing compartment was bounded by the cytoplasmic membrane and peptidoglycan. This phenotype was not evident in bacteria cultivated at low or moderate salinity, nor was it associated with murein lipoprotein (Lpp) deficiency, and it differed from those elicited by the MreB inhibitor A-22 or the FtsI inhibitor aztreonam at low or high salinity. It was suppressed by deletion of spr, which encodes one of three murein hydrolases that are redundantly essential for enlargement of the murein sacculus. Prc deficiency may alter bacterial morphology by impairing control of Spr activity at high salinity. ProQ and Prc deficiencies lowered the ProP activity of bacteria cultivated at moderate salinity by approximately 70% and 30%, respectively, but did not affect other osmoregulatory functions. The effects of ProQ and Prc deficiencies on ProP activity are indirect, reflecting their roles in the maintenance of cell structure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".