Characterization of membrane pores formed by newly discovered colicin FY from Yersinia frederiksenii

Colicins are toxic exocellular proteins used by Gram-negative bacteria for interspecies and intraspecies competition. The colicin FY is a pore-forming protein which was recently discovered at Masaryk university. Kolicin FY is produced by strain Yersinia frederiksenii Y27601 and is active against other strains of genus Yersinia. By comparison of aminoacid sequences of C-terminal domains of selected colicins it was proved, that colicin FY is closely related to colicin Ib (Bosák et al., 2012). In this work I was trying to create brief and integrated summary about the group of colicins from the perspective of an outer membrane traslocation mechanism, overcoming the periplasmic space up to isertion of C-terminal colicin domain into the inner membrane phospholipid bilayer. Other aim of my work was to generally summarize pore properties of known colicins and compare them with recently measured characteristics of colicin FY. Keywords: colicin, Yersinia, planar lipid membranes, membrane por