Figure 5.

The effect of C‐terminal truncations of SosA on the inhibitory activity of the protein. A. Schematic representation of the different truncated SosA constructs. Full‐length SosA is a 77‐amino acid peptide. SosAd10 lacks the extreme C‐terminal 10 amino acids, while SosAd40 is SosA truncated of almost its entire extracellular C‐terminal part. Indicated conserved residues (*) originate from the alignment in Fig. 1. B. Activity of the constructs was assessed in S. aureus RN4220 and compared to the vector control (vector). Cells were grown exponentially to an OD₆₀₀ of 0.5, serially 10‐fold diluted and plated on TSA (control) or TSA plus inducer (AHT) at indicated increasing concentrations followed by incubation overnight at 37°C. C. Visualization of the drastic cell size increase and the reduction in cell number of JE2/pRAB12‐lacZ (control) and JE2/pRAB12‐sosAd10 in presence of 200 ng ml⁻¹ of AHT by time‐lapse phase‐contrast microscopy at 37°C. Scale bar represents 2 µm.