Insights into the transport mechanism of energy-coupling factor transporters

Vitamins are essential nutrients for organisms. Many organisms depend on cofactors obtained from the environment. Some organisms didn’t develop complete biosynthetic pathways to produce those compounds or while having complete pathway they still have systems to scavenge nutrients from the extracellular environment. A selective uptake of nutrients is entrusted to transport proteins residing in the cell membrane. The importance of nutrient transport systems is reflected in high content of transport proteins in prokaryotic genomes (up to 16%). Transporters are proteins mostly specialized for a specific substrate or a group of substrates. The mechanisms of transport of key compounds for the bacterial survival may differ significantly. It is extremely interesting how different solutions evolved in nature to transport diverse solutes. Our work is concentrated around Energy-coupling factor (ECF) transporters. Those unique transporters use energy of ATP to transport vitamins and micronutrients across the prokaryotic lipid bilayer.