ArticleStructure (London, England : 1993)2023
Cryo-EM structure of the Agrobacterium tumefaciens T4SS-associated T-pilus reveals stoichiometric protein-phospholipid assembly.
Article in Structure (London, England : 1993), 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 21 citations in OpenAlex.
- Phospholipid-independent biogenesis and function of the RP4 conjugation pilus.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The Ti Plasmid-Encoded VirJ Functions as a Lysyl-Phosphatidylglycerol Hydrolase in Agrobacterium tumefaciens.Molecular microbiology · 2026Article
- Type IV Secretion System Drives Lipid Mixing.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Phospholipid-independent biogenesis of a functional RP4 conjugation pilus.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Cryo-EM structure of the conjugation H-pilus reveals the cyclic nature of the TrhA pilin.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Inner membrane components of the plasmid pKM101 type IV secretion system TraE and TraD are DNA-binding proteins.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Saccharibacteria deploy two distinct type IV pili, driving episymbiosis, host competition, and twitching motility.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- ThemicroLife · 2025Review
- Structural and functional diversity of type IV secretion systems.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2024Review
- Chimeric systems composed of swapped Tra subunits between distantly-related F plasmids reveal striking plasticity among type IV secretion machines.PLoS genetics · 2024Article
- The mating pilus ofmBio · 2024Article
- Chimeric systems composed of swapped Tra subunits between distantly-related F plasmids reveal striking plasticity among type IV secretion machines.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- DNA Transport through the Dynamic Type IV Secretion System.Infection and immunity · 2023Review
- Rapid Synthesis of Cryo-ET Data for Training Deep Learning Models.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Archaeal DNA-import apparatus is homologous to bacterial conjugation machinery.Nature communications · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 6 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Agrobacterium tumefaciens causes crown gall disease in plants by the horizontal transfer of oncogenic DNA. The conjugation is mediated by the VirB/D4 type 4 secretion system (T4SS) that assembles an extracellular filament, the T-pilus, and is involved in mating pair formation between A. tumefaciens and the recipient plant cell. Here, we present a 3 Å cryoelectron microscopy (cryo-EM) structure of the T-pilus solved by helical reconstruction. Our structure reveals that the T-pilus is a stoichiometric assembly of the VirB2 major pilin and phosphatidylglycerol (PG) phospholipid with 5-start helical symmetry. We show that PG head groups and the positively charged Arg 91 residues of VirB2 protomers form extensive electrostatic interactions in the lumen of the T-pilus. Mutagenesis of Arg 91 abolished pilus formation. While our T-pilus structure is architecturally similar to previously published conjugative pili structures, the T-pilus lumen is narrower and positively charged, raising questions of whether the T-pilus is a conduit for ssDNA transfer.
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