Bacterial cell division involves a contractile ring that organises downstream proteins at the division site and which contains the tubulin homologue FtsZ. ZapC has been discovered as a non-essential regulator of FtsZ. It localises to the septal ring and deletion of zapC leads to a mild phenotype, while overexpression inhibits cell division. Interference with cell division is facilitated by an i...

The bacterial cell division protein FtsZ assembles into the cytokinetic Z ring that directs cytokinesis in prokaryotes. In Escherichia coli the formation of the Z ring is prevented by induction of the cell division inhibitor SulA (SfiA), a component of the SOS response. Here we show that a MalE-SulA fusion that retains this inhibitory function in vivo inhibits the GTPase activity and polymeriza...

A classical result of Noncommutative Algebra due to I. Niven, N. Jacobson and R. Baer asserts that an associative noncommutative division ring D has finite dimension over its center R and is algebraically closed (that is, every nonconstant polynomial in one indeterminate with left, or right, coefficients in D has a root in D) if and only if R is a real closed field and D is isomorphic to the ri...

ZipA and FtsA are recruited independently to the FtsZ cytokinetic ring (Z ring) and are essential for cell division of Escherichia coli. The molecular role of FtsA in cell division is unknown; however, ZipA is thought to stabilize the Z ring, anchor it to the membrane, and recruit downstream cell division proteins. Here we demonstrate that the requirement for ZipA can be bypassed completely by ...

In the late stage of the mitotic cycle of eukaryotic cells , cytokinesis ensues where a parent cell replicates its nucleus with the necessary genetical substances (i.e., DNAs and chromosomes) and splits into two similar offspring cells. This mitotic process involves complex chemical, biophysical and mechanical processes whose details are just begin to be unfolded experimentally. In this paper, ...

In Escherichia coli, the Min system, consisting of three proteins, MinC, MinD, and MinE, negatively regulates FtsZ assembly at the cell poles, helping to ensure that the Z ring will assemble only at midcell. Of the three Min proteins, MinC is sufficient to inhibit Z-ring assembly. By binding to MinD, which is mostly localized at the membrane near the cell poles, MinC is sequestered away from th...

Division-site selection and contractile-ring assembly are two crucial steps in cytokinesis. In fission yeast, the anillin-like Mid1 protein specifies the division site at the cell equator by assembling cortical nodes, the precursors of the contractile ring. Thus, Mid1 is essential for linking the positional cues for the cleavage site to contractile-ring formation. However, how Mid1 domains coop...