Jones, C.J., M. Homma, and R.M. Macnab. 1987. "Identification of Proteins of the Outer (L and P) Rings of the Flagellar Basal Body of Escherichia coli." Journal of Bacteriology 169(4):1489 1492.

Synthesis of the Salmonella typhimurium hook protein from the gene cloned on a multicopy plasmid results in partial suppression of the flagellar assembly defects of certain classes of Escherichia coli mutants (K. Ohnishi, M. Homma, K. Kutsukake, and T. Iino, J. Bacteriol., 169:1485-1488, 1987). This phenomenon allowed hook-basal body complexes from such mutants to be purified and analyzed by electron microscopy and gel electrophoresis. The absence of the P and L rings in such structures was found to correlate with the absence of proteins of apparent molecular weight 39,000 and 26,000, respectively. Gene-polypeptide correlations from other studies enabled us to complete gene-polypeptide-structure correspondences for these two proteins as flaM <—> 39-kilodalton protein <—> P ring and flaY <—> 26-kilodalton protein <—> L ring.