A nuclease‐toxin and immunity system for kin discrimination in Myxococcus xanthus

The use of toxin to attack neighbours and immunity proteins to protect against toxin has been observed in bacterial conflicts, including kin discrimination. Here, we report a novel nuclease‐toxin and its immunity protein function in the colony‐merger incompatibility, a kind of bacterial kin discrimination, in Myxococcus xanthus DK1622. The MXAN_0049 gene was determined to be a genetic determinant for colony‐merger incompatibility, and the incompatibility could be eliminated by deletion of the upstream co‐transcribed MXAN_0050 gene. We demonstrated that the MXAN_0050 protein was a nuclease, and MXAN_0049 protein was able to bind to MXAN_0050 to block nuclease activity in vitro. Expression of MXAN_0050 in Escherichia coli inhibited cellular growth, and the inhibition effect could be recovered by co‐expression of MXAN_0049. We found that deletion of the PAAR‐encoding gene (MXAN_0044) or the type VI secretion system led to the colony‐merger and co‐existence with the ΔMXAN_0049 mutant, suggesting that they were associated with colony‐merger incompatibility. Homologues of the nuclease‐toxin and cognate immunity pair are widely distributed in bacteria. We propose a simplified model to explain the kin discrimination mechanism mediated by the nuclease‐toxin and immunity protein.© 2018 Society for Applied Microbiology and John Wiley & Sons Ltd