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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2014 Mar 27.
Published in final edited form as: J Am Chem Soc. 2013 Mar 13;135(12):4632–4635. doi: 10.1021/ja312510m

Figure 1.

Figure 1

Bacterial cell wall is assembled from the precursor Lipid II. (a) Schematic of an E. coli cell and the chemical structure of its cell wall, composed of alternating GlcNAc (blue) and Mur-NAc (green) residues with attached peptide side chains that can be crosslinked. Purified E. coli cell wall typically lacks terminal D-Ala residues (red). (b) Chemical structure of Gram-positive L-Lys Lipid II (1a) and Gram-negative m-DAP Lipid II (1b),8 which differ at the third residue of the peptide side chain. Because R varies depending on the organism, a flexible route to 1 is needed to study the PG synthesis of various organisms.