Author(s): Alex Everett
Mentor(s): Randy Klabacka, Jeremy Bakelar
Institution UTech
The β-barrel assembly machinery (BAM) complex is a crucial protein complex located in the outer membrane of gram-negative bacteria. This complex is responsible for integrating proteins into the bacterial outer membrane. The purpose of this project is to investigate the evolutionary conservation of two the essential component of BAM, BamA and a related homologous protein TamA. Given the importance of these proteins, we hypothesized that there would be a high amino acid sequence conservation among various gram-negative bacteria of the genus Escherichia and across the bacterial tree of life. Comparing these sequences to all other Escherichia proteins, we found that protein-wide level sequence conservation is not significantly different in the BAM proteins (rather sequence conservation is average). However, looking at the conservation of each position within the amino acid sequences we see high levels of conservation at some sites across the bacterial tree of life, suggesting that the conservation of certain positions rather than the protein as a whole is critical for the vital function that these genes play.