A Single Molecule Localization and In situ Crosslinking Study of the Beta-barrel Assembly Machinery in Escherichia coli

In order to sense changes in, respond to, and exploit their environmental niches, bacteria rely on structures assembled into their outer membrane. A set of bacterial proteins collectively known as the Beta-barrel Assembly Machinery is solely responsible for catalysing the biogenesis of this membrane. By employing genetic code expansion tools and advanced molecular imaging techniques, the Super-resolution microscopy, we interrogated the interactome and membrane spatial representation of these proteins. Our findings present a missing piece of the mechanistic puzzle on how these proteins catalyse the events involving the propagation of the outer membrane.