This finding could offer new targets for the development of new antibiotics.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to show that E. coli uses similar strategies to regulate gene transcription as other more complex cell types.

There’s concern around the world about the future effectiveness of antibiotics with growing resistance to multiple antibiotics. Being able to treat bacterial infections is critical to maintaining global health. There are few new antibiotics in development. Any greater understanding of the function of bacteria could be critical to finding a solution to antibiotic resistance.

Just like the human body is made up of organs that perform specialized functions, individual cells contain specialized compartments – such as energy-producing mitochondria – called organelles. Complex cells contain many different organelles, most of which are enclosed by a membrane that holds them together. Because bacteria do not have membrane-bound organelles, they were assumed to lack them altogether.

Stephanie Weber, an assistant professor in McGill’s Department of Biology, and her team are the first to show that bacteria do in fact have such specialized compartments.

“Our paper provides evidence for a bacterial organelle that is held together by ‘sticky’ proteins rather than a membrane,” says Weber, who is the study’s senior author.

The bacterial organelles described in the study are formed in a similar fashion to membraneless cellular compartments found in more complex eukaryotic cells (cells with a nucleus) through a process called phase separation, the same phenomenon that causes oil and vinegar to separate in salad dressing.

“This is the first direct evidence of phase separation in bacteria, so it may be a universal process in all cell types, and could even have been involved in the origin of life,” explains Weber.

Because of the small size of the bacterial cells they were studying, Weber’s team used an imaging technique – photo activated localization microscopy – to track the organelle-forming proteins.

Weber is now trying to understand exactly how the proteins assemble into organelles. Because they’re involved in the first steps of gene expression – transcription – she believes they might also be an interesting target for the development of a new generation of antibiotic drugs, which are urgently needed to combat drug resistance.

“Clusters of bacterial RNA polymerase are biomolecular condensates that assemble through liquid-liquid phase seperation,” by Anne-Marie Ladouceur et al. was published in PNAS.

This work received financial support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

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This may prove challenging in a country with a population of almost 1.4 billion, but with just under 13 per cent of arable land, close to half of which is suffering from soil degradation.

After analyzing the potential impacts of various current trade-related food policies, the researchers have arrived at the conclusion that the current Red Line arable land protection policy is insufficient to reach the government’s desired goal. They predict that China will achieve only 90 per cent self-sufficiency in wheat and rice by 2030 if business continues as usual.

Moreover, they add that if the population continues to grow at its current rate, by 2050 grain self-sufficiency will have dropped to 83 per cent, with the poor being most affected as food prices rise.

In a controversial finding, the researchers instead suggest that if the government hopes to attain grain self-sufficiency it needs to set out to both preserve and increase the areas given over to grain production.

How they reached this conclusion:

The researchers used a global computable general equilibrium model to calculate the potential future effects on grain production of five different policy scenarios relating to food production and trade:

• A reduction in meat tariffs to discourage domestic production of meat and replace it with production of feed and food grains: The researchers calculate that this is likely to have a significant and very positive impact on outputs of rice and wheat and could contribute towards grain self-sufficiency above 90 per cent in 2050.
• A reduction in grain tariffs to eliminate protection for China’s grain producers: The researchers calculate that this will have a mixed impact on China given that although it increases the chances of grain self-sufficiency, it has a marginal negative effect on social welfare.
• The imposition of higher tariffs on grain imports to encourage high grain self-sufficiency: The researchers calculate that this will increase grain self-sufficiency over time although, for poor households, it may raise prices and reduce private consumption.
• The free-trade agreement with Australia about meat-trade: The researchers calculate that this is a win-win situation since it will ease rising prices and spur consumption.
• The Chinese-Korean free-trade negotiations to remove all tariffs on meat from China that is imported to Korea: The researchers calculate that this will have a positive impact on meat export but negligible impact on food grains, not so favourable overall.

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