ArticleNature communications2024
Adhesion pilus retraction powers twitching motility in the thermoacidophilic crenarchaeon Sulfolobus acidocaldarius.
Article in Nature communications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- β-strand addition within tip initiation complexes licenses assembly of diverse type IV filaments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- β-strand complementation within tip initiation complexes licenses assembly of diverse type IV filaments.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Article
- S-layer architecture and glycosylation and their role in shaping virus-host specificity in prokaryotes.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Review
- Physicochemical, Structural, and Proteomic Insights into Drinking Water-Isolated Acinetobacter calcoaceticus Aggregation and Biofilm Dynamics.Microbial ecology · 2025Article
- Article
- Towards a molecular picture of the archaeal cell surface.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The use of thermostable fluorescent proteins for live imaging inFrontiers in microbiology · 2024Article
- Viruses of theFrontiers in microbiology · 2023Review
- Probing archaeal cell biology: exploring the use of dyes in the imaging ofFrontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
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Abstract
Type IV pili are filamentous appendages found in most bacteria and archaea, where they can support functions such as surface adhesion, DNA uptake, aggregation, and motility. In most bacteria, PilT-family ATPases disassemble adhesion pili, causing them to rapidly retract and produce twitching motility, important for surface colonization. As archaea do not possess PilT homologs, it was thought that archaeal pili cannot retract and that archaea do not exhibit twitching motility. Here, we use live-cell imaging, automated cell tracking, fluorescence imaging, and genetic manipulation to show that the hyperthermophilic archaeon Sulfolobus acidocaldarius exhibits twitching motility, driven by retractable adhesion (Aap) pili, under physiologically relevant conditions (75 °C, pH 2). Aap pili are thus capable of retraction in the absence of a PilT homolog, suggesting that the ancestral type IV pili in the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) were capable of retraction.
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