holdfast

traitmech:000184 · CLASS · PROPOSED

A morphology trait in which a bacterial cell produces a localized polar adhesive matrix called a holdfast that mediates permanent attachment to surfaces.

Trait evidence (3)

DOI:10.1128/jb.00276-19
Caulobacter crescentus synthesizes a polysaccharide-based adhesin known as the holdfast at one of its cell poles, which enables tight attachment to exogenous surfaces.

Hershey et al. support holdfast as a Caulobacter polar polysaccharide-based adhesin mediating tight surface attachment.
DOI:10.1128/jb.00276-19
Glucose, 3-O-methylglucose, mannose, N-acetylglucosamine, and xylose were detected in our extracts.

The compositional analysis supports the holdfast matrix as a bacterial polysaccharide-rich adhesive.
DOI:10.1128/jb.00273-22
Species of the Caulobacterales produce a specialized polar adhesin, holdfast, which is required for permanent attachment to surfaces.

Chepkwony et al. support holdfast as a specialized polar Caulobacterales adhesin required for permanent attachment.

Provenance

Identifier source: TraitMech local identifier
Definition source: DOI:10.1128/jb.00276-19

Parent traits (1)

phenotype METPO:1000059

Synonyms (1)

holdfast adhesin RELATED_SYNONYM · DOI:10.1128/jb.00276-19

kg-microbe context

No kg-microbe node embedding matched this record in the 2026-04-25 deepwalk.

Canonical examples (1)

Organisms cited as exemplars of this trait. Taxon ids are NCBITaxon and link out to the NCBI record.

Caulobacter vibrioides NCBITaxon:155892 DOI:10.1128/jb.00276-19 Model freshwater Caulobacter species, long called Caulobacter crescentus, that produces a polar holdfast.

Discussions and Knowledge Gaps (1)

Open questions attached to this trait. Seeded by just knowledge-gap-scan and curated; see the corpus-wide index.

Resolve exact external ontology xrefs for the bacterial holdfast morphology trait.

CURATION TODO OPEN holdfast-exact-xref-gap · raised by codex · 2026-09-14

Not yet attached to a section of this record — a curator sets attaches_to (e.g. causal_graphs#some_edge) so the gap shows beside the mechanism it concerns.

The pinned METPO snapshot contains only the deprecated METPO:1000158 obsolete holdfast class; no active METPO, GO, or OBO class was accepted as an exact equivalent for this bacterial adhesive-matrix trait.

Curation history

2026-09-14T06:26:17Z · MINTED_TRAITMECH_ID · codex
Minted holdfast as a DOI-backed TraitRecord after a repository-wide duplicate review covering ignored and hidden files; live METPO has no active exact holdfast class and the placeholder is reserved in proposals/metpo_traitmech_v61.