Assembly of the outermost spore layer: pieces of the puzzle are coming together

Certain endospore-forming soil dwelling bacteria are important human, animal or insect pathogens. These organisms produce spores containing an outer layer, the exosporium. The exosporium is the site of interactions between the spore and the soil environment and between the spore and the infected host during the initial stages of infection. The composition and assembly process of the exosporium are poorly understood. This is partly due to the extreme stability of the exosporium that has proven to be refractive to existing methods to deconstruct the intact structure into its component parts. Although more than 20 proteins have been identified as exosporium-associated, their abundance, relationship to other proteins and the processes by which they are assembled to create the exosporium are largely unknown. In this issue of Molecular Microbiology, Terry, Jiang, and colleagues in Per Bullough's laboratory show that the ExsY protein is a major structural protein of the exosporium basal layer of B. cereus family spores and that it can self-assemble into complex structures that possess many of the structural features characteristic of the exosporium basal layer. The authors refined a model for exosporium assembly. Their findings may have implications for exosporium formation in other spore forming bacteria, including Clostridium species.