General information for authorsThis Research Topic deals with the complex landscape of post-translational modifications (PTMs) in bacteria. The Topic is associated with the
3rd International Conference on Post-Translational Modifications in Bacteria (December 3-4, 2018, Tübingen, Germany). All conference participants are encouraged to contribute manuscripts related to topics of their presentations. Conference participants are requested to submit their manuscripts through the conference website by clicking
here; the deadline for abstract submissions for the conference goers will be
May 31st 2018.
Submission to the research topic are not limited to the conference participants. Spontaneous submissions are encouraged, in which case we would request a pre-submission of an abstract through the Frontiers platform, rather than the conference website. The deadline for spontaneous abstract submissions will be
February 1st 2019. We will accept original research papers, reviews and mini-review/opinion type manuscripts.
This Research Topic is a second edition of a Research Topic published in 2015. To see the original, please click
here.
Background on bacterial PTMsPTMs are widely employed by all living organisms to regulate protein activity, stability and localization. The transient and reversible nature of most PTMs makes them a particularly suitable tool for rapid signal transduction. A wide spectrum of PTMs has been detected in the bacterial cells. Some of the most common PTMs include phosphorylation, glycosylation, acetylation (including that of sirtuins), pupylation, methylation, lipidation, carboxylation, bacillithiolation and targeted degradation of bacterial proteins. The landscape of PTMs known to exist in bacterial cells is rapidly expanding, primarily due to advances of detection methods, mainly based on mass spectrometry proteomics. Increasingly large datasets of PTMs are currently being mapped onto metabolic and regularly networks of bacterial cells
in silico, in order to assess their global impact on the physiology. An emerging aspect of bacterial PTMs is the complex cross-talk among different modifications. A single protein often carries several different PTMS, and the modification sites are often inter-dependent; modification of one residue affects (positively or negatively) modification of other sites on the same protein.
Current focus of the fieldGlobal trends in bacterial research have shifted from classical model organisms to bacterial pathogens, bacterial cell factories and complex commensal communities in the human gut. PTMs play crucial roles in all those bacteria. Bacterial pathogens are known to use PTMs to trigger virulence functions, adapt their metabolism to the interaction with the host or scramble the host immune system signaling. PTMs that regulate activities of metabolic enzymes or expression of biosynthetic pathways are increasingly used in metabolic engineering of more efficient cell factories. Finally, PMTs are expected to play a prominent role in metabolic adaptation and symbiosis in bacterial commensal communities. Studying those still represents a tremendous technical challenge, imposed by sample complexity, non-cultivability and low abundance of certain species. This will require a major push in methods development for various omics and computational biology. With the increasing coverage of bacterial PTMs that can be detected using advanced proteomics methods, the field is now facing challenges in data analysis and integration in comprehensive genome-based metabolic and regulatory models.