And then came the wildest part:
On its surface, L. aerophila carries a toolkit of cell surface appendages:
⚡ Archaella (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...)
⚡ Tight adherence (Tad) pili
⚡ Grappling hooks-like filaments 🪝

CryoET revealed a multilayered cell envelope in L. aerophila. Single cells within filaments are enclosed by a cytoplasmic membrane and share one outer layer, connected by septal channels. But L. aerophila joins other members of the phylum in breaking that rule.

Most bacteria divide synchronously into single cells.
Not this one. Instead of splitting evenly into single cells, L. aerophila grows as long filaments. Using live-cell imaging, we saw that division events happen asynchronously and asymmetrically.

🚨 Imagine a bacterium that refuses to follow the textbook:
It grows as tangled filaments, divides unevenly, reshapes its own membranes… and even builds grappling hooks.
Meet Litorilinea aerophila — and here’s why it blew our minds.

And I got a very special surprise from @danielabarilla.bsky.social! Thanks so much, made my day!

For my birthday today, I got a cake for the lab celebrating another special date: this year, it is 30 years that I have worked with Sulfolobus, 15 years since she started her PhD with me, and with all the others in the lab, we combined more than 50 years of experience working with Sulfolobus!

We solved the structure of filament using cryoEM-SPA and could show that the bacterial archaellin ArlB1 makes up the archaellum filament! This is the first characterized bacterium with an archaellum filament. 6/n

We choose a cultivated Chloroflexota, Litorilinea aerophila to study archaellation in vivo. L. aerophila encodes for a complete archaeal operon 5/n

We got intrigued and wondered how widespread the archaellum machinery is in Bacteria and indeed 244 genomes from Chloroflexota code for a bona fide archaellum machinery! If archaellum genes were present no flagellum genes were found. Maybe they exchanged the complex flagella for archaella? 4/n

The Molecular Biology of Archaea lab is now a little longer than 10 years at the @uni-freiburg.de at @biologyunifreiburg.bsky.social !
I want to thank all the members of the group (PhD students, Postdocs and technicians) and all the students for making this an exciting place to do science!

Love to be at Pasteur as you can meet so many people: great to also chat with @sgribaldo.bsky.social !

Visiting @arianebriegel.bsky.social at the Institute Pasteur ! Great to see her new lab!

If you see this, wuite post with a beach frim your gallery.

Enjoyed a PhD defence at the @unigroningen.bsky.social together with @arianebriegel.bsky.social and Tessa Quax.

Good memories back to my own defence at @unigroningen.bsky.social 23 years ago!

Nice! Works well for me! #myPubMedcloud ! 🦠🧫