| Abstract: |
The era of structural biology and genomics has opened new horizons in our understanding of complex biological questions. Three dimensional membrane transporter structures from X-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance, and increasingly, cryo-electron microscopy, have provided us invaluable information on the mechanisms of transporter function, while comparative genomic approaches for the analysis of membrane transport systems have provided insights into how microbes adapt to their environment. The observation that organisms with similar lifestyles and/or ecological niches display similar transporter profiles despite their phylogenetic and taxonomic differences strongly suggest the influence of the ambient environment on an organism’s complement of membrane transport genes. © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. |
