During sporulation, Bacillus subtilis forms an asymmetric septum, dividing the cell into two compartments, a mother cell and a forespore. The site of asymmetric septation is linked to the membrane where FtsZ and SpoIIE initiate the formation of the Z-ring and the E-ring, respectively. These rings then serve as a scaffold for the other cell division and peptidoglycan synthesizing proteins needed to build the septum. However, despite decades of research, not enough is known about how the asymmetric septation site is determined. Here, we identified and characterized the interaction between SpoIIE and RefZ. We show that these two proteins transiently colocalize during the early stages of asymmetric septum formation when RefZ localizes primarily from the mother cell side of the septum. We propose that these proteins and their interplay with the spatial organization of the chromosome play a role in controlling asymmetric septum positioning.

Department of Microbial Genetics Institute of Molecular Biology Slovak Academy of Sciences Bratislava Slovakia

Laboratory of Microbial Genetics and Gene Expression Institute of Microbiology of the Czech Academy of Sciences Prague Czech Republic

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