QnAs with Joe Lutkenhaus.

Bacterial cell division is an intricate process involving the highly coordinated interplay of many different proteins. Joe Lutkenhaus, a microbiology professor at Kansas University Medical Center, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014 for his key contributions to unraveling the complexities of this process. Among other findings, Lutkenhaus discovered a protein, FtsZ, which is essential for cell division in Escherichia coli, and showed that the protein assembles into a ring, called the Z-ring, at the future site of cell division in the middle of the cell. Investigating the mechanisms of the spatial regulation of FtsZ led Lutkenhaus to the Min system of proteins—MinC, MinD, and MinE—that inhibit FtsZ everywhere except in the middle of the cell. In his Inaugural Article (1), Lutkenhaus and colleagues reveal how MinE switches between membrane-bound and cytoplasmic forms, thus elucidating a key step in the spatial regulation of bacterial cell division. He recently spoke to PNAS about his findings.