Structural and Molecular Biology of a Protein-Polymerizing Nanomachine for Pilus Biogenesis

Bacteria produce protein polymers on their surface called pill or fimbriae that serve either as attachment devices or as conduits for secreted substrates. This review will focus on the chaperone usher pathway of pilus biogenesis, a widespread assembly line for pilus production at the surface of Gram-negative bacteria and the archetypical protein-polymerizing nanomachine. Comparison with other nanomachines polymerizing other types of biological units, such as nucleotides during DNA replication, provides some unifying principles as to how multidomain proteins assemble biological polymers. (C) 2017 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).