Table 2 shows that TGF-beta inhibitor the wild-type strain possesses phosphatidylcholine (47.6±3.9% of total phospholipids) and phosphatidylethanolamine (27.5±6.5%) as

major phospholipids. In contrast, DBM13 showed a marked decrease of phosphatidylcholine and a concomitant increase of phosphatidylethanolamine (24.8±3.8% and 57.6±5.2%, respectively), indicating that pmtA plays a major role in phosphatidylcholine biosynthesis in SEMIA 6144. Probably, the significant amounts of phosphatidylcholine still remaining in DBM13 are due to activities encoded by other functional pmt genes. In a similar way, the biosynthesis of phosphatidylcholine in B. japonicum USDA 110 is achieved through the action of different Pmt activities (Hacker et al., 2008). The reduction in phosphatidylcholine Selleckchem Enzalutamide and the increase in phosphatidylethanolamine in the mutant DBM13

were accompanied by a decrease in the cardiolipin level (Table 2). A slight reduction in cardiolipin had also been observed in the pmtA mutant of B. japonicum (Minder et al., 2001). When DBM13 was complemented with pDBM07, carrying the wild-type pmtA gene, the phospholipid levels were restored to those of the wild type, while phospholipid levels in DBM13 containing the empty vector pBBR1MCS-5 were similar to those of pmtA-deficient cells (Table 2). In order to characterize the phenotype of SEMIA 6144 pmtA-deficient mutant, their growth behaviour was monitored under aerobic growth conditions in rich YEM medium (Somasegaran and Hoben, 1994) and in B− minimal medium (van Brussel et al., 1977). Although the learn more viability of the parental and its isogenic mutant strain determined as CFU mL−1 was similar in all culture media tested (data not shown), we found that the OD620 nm of the DBM13 cultures was always lower than that in its parental strain. Furthermore, we noticed that wild-type

colonies were larger than colonies of the mutant strain (Fig. 2). Determination of cell size under the light microscope showed that wild-type cells were longer than DBM13 cells (Table 3). Both phenotypes, colony and cell size were recovered when plasmid pDBM07 was introduced into DBM13. The recovery in cell and colony size of the complemented mutant correlates with the recovery of its phosphatidylcholine levels (Table 2). The formation of cardiolipin domains at the cell pole and the division site plays an important role in selection and recognition of the division site by cell cycle and cell division proteins in E. coli (Mileykovskaya et al., 2009). Because the level of cardiolipin was reduced to more than half in DBM13 with respect to wild-type cells (Table 2), it is possible that the decrease in cell size is due to the reduction of cardiolipin. Bernal et al.