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Record W4406135884 · doi:10.1098/rsob.240310

Structure of WzxE the lipid III flippase for Enterobacterial Common Antigen polysaccharide

2025· article· en· W4406135884 on OpenAlexafffund
Audrey Le Bas, Bradley R. Clarke, Tanisha Teelucksingh, Micah Lee, Kamel El Omari, Andrew M. Giltrap, S.A. McMahon, Hui Liu, John H. Beale, Vitaliy Mykhaylyk, Ramona Duman, Neil G. Paterson, Philip N. Ward, Peter J. Harrison, Miriam Weckener, Els Pardon, Jan Steyaert, Huanting Liu, Andrew Quigley, Benjamin G. Davis, Armin Wagner, Chris Whitfield, James H. Naismith

Bibliographic record

VenueOpen Biology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicEscherichia coli research studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Guelph
FundersEngineering and Physical Sciences Research CouncilCanadian Institutes of Health ResearchDiamond Light SourceFonds Wetenschappelijk OnderzoekCanada Research ChairsWellcome Trust
KeywordsFlippaseBiologyBiogenesisLipid IIEscherichia coliBacterial outer membraneGlycanBiochemistryTwin-arginine translocation pathwayMembrane proteinBiosynthesisMembrane transport proteinEnzymePhospholipidMembraneGenePhosphatidylserine

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The enterobacterial common antigen (ECA) is conserved in Gram-negative bacteria of the Enterobacterales order although its function is debated. ECA biogenesis depends on the Wzx/Wzy-dependent strategy whereby the newly synthesized lipid-linked repeat units, lipid III, are transferred across the inner membrane by the lipid III flippase WzxE. WzxE is part of the Wzx family and required in many glycan assembly systems, but an understanding of its molecular mechanism is hindered due to a lack of structural evidence. Here, we present the first X-ray structures of WzxE from Escherichia coli in complex with nanobodies. Both inward- and outward-facing conformations highlight two pairs of arginine residues that move in a reciprocal fashion, enabling flipping. One of the arginine pairs coordinated to a glutamate residue is essential for activity along with the C-terminal arginine rich tail located close to the entrance of the lumen. This work helps understand the translocation mechanism of the Wzx flippase family.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.002
Threshold uncertainty score0.006

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.015
GPT teacher head0.349
Teacher spread0.335 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designBench or experimental
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations11
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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