TY - JOUR T1 - Mechanistic Basis of Branch-Site Selection in Filamentous Bacteria A1 - Richards, David M. A1 - Hempel, Antje M. A1 - Flärdh, Klas A1 - Buttner, Mark J. A1 - Howard, Martin Y1 - 2012/03/08 N2 - Author Summary Amongst the great variety of shapes that organisms assume, many grow in a filamentous manner and develop at least partly into a network of branches. Examples include plant roots, fungi and some bacteria. Whereas the mechanisms of filamentous growth are partially understood in fungi, the same cannot be said in filamentous bacteria, where our knowledge of hyphal growth regulation is very limited. To rectify this we have studied the bacteria Streptomyces, which are an excellent model for all hyphal bacteria. The protein DivIVA is known to play a critical role in controlling filamentous growth in Streptomyces, forming large foci at branch tips and smaller foci that mark sites of future branch outgrowth. However, until now nothing was known about how these foci first appear. We have shown experimentally that new foci appear via a novel mechanism, whereby existing tip-foci split into two clusters. The larger cluster remains at the growing tip, while the smaller cluster fixes onto the adjacent lateral membrane, where it grows in size, eventually initiating a new branch. By mathematically modelling how DivIVA foci grow, we show how this one simple mechanism of focus formation can quantitatively capture the statistical properties of the entire hyphal branching network. JF - PLOS Computational Biology JA - PLOS Computational Biology VL - 8 IS - 3 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002423 SP - e1002423 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002423 ER -