On Nov. 3, 2020, NIAID researchers and colleagues announced they had discovered a mechanism that some bacteria, such as those that cause Q fever and Legionaries disease, use to assemble their cell envelope. Their study in Nature Microbiology explains how these pathogens use many different membrane proteins, called ﾓporins,ﾔ to tether the outer membrane to the bacterial cell wall.

These findings offered a new perspective on bacterial cell structure, which is important for development of new antimicrobial therapies.