Abstract
Diverse lipid A structures have been observed in a multitude of Gram-negative bacteria, but the metabolic logic of lipid A biosynthesis is widely conserved. This chapter will start by describing the nine constitutive enzymes of the Raetz pathway, which catalyze conserved lipid A biosynthetic reactions that depend on cytoplasmic cofactors. Concomitant with lipid A export and assembly on the cell surface, a number of regulated covalent modifications of lipid A can occur in the extracytoplasmic compartments. The narrow phylogenetic distribution of the lipid A modification enzymes, combined with the diverse regulatory signals governing their expression, is responsible for most of the lipid A structural diversity that is observed in nature. By focusing on E. coli as a model system, the general principles of lipid A biosynthesis and assembly are revealed to inform related processes that occur in more divergent organisms.
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Work in the author’s laboratory was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. We apologize to those authors whose work could not be cited due to space limitations.
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Bishop, R.E. (2019). Lipid A. In: Geiger, O. (eds) Biogenesis of Fatty Acids, Lipids and Membranes. Handbook of Hydrocarbon and Lipid Microbiology . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50430-8_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50430-8_10
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