Talk:Lysin

Naming Scheme
I don't like the word "Lysin", not only because "Lysine" is an aminoacid, but also because in german the amino acid Lysine is called Lysin. So this can cause confusion. It would be better to call these Enzymes "Endolysins" or "Holins", both of which I believe to be better names. Perhaps this can be considered in the long run. 84.112.136.52 (talk) 17:49, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Lysin has an historical use when describing a phage lysin. Endolysin is a more technical term based on its mode of action.  Holin cannot be used in its place since holins are a completely different phage encoded molecule used by the phage to create a "hole" in the bacterial cell membrane to allow the lysin (which does not have a leader sequence) to access the cell wall peptidoglycan.  Thus "Phage Lysin" or "Lysin" is the best term to use. There are many words that may be confused with other words, but they are not changed for that reason. 24.189.128.226 (talk) 18:03, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

What lysins in each of the 19 phage families
bacteriophage says "Nine families infect bacteria only, nine infect archaea only, and one (Tectiviridae) infects both bacteria and archaea." - what can we say about the lysins in each family - do any work on archaea ? - Rod57 (talk) 13:35, 1 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Very few Archaeal taxa possess pseudomurein cell walls, which are cleavable by specialized lysins (see e.g. 1). For most Archaea, holins coupled to "specific tailor made proteases would be required to degrade archaeal S-layers of different species" (2). I'll add this info the article. Neodop (talk) 17:07, 1 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks.
 * Generally, It would be nice to list or group the known lysins (are there 9 or 900 ?) Article at the moment only seems to mention streptococcal PlyC, pneumococcal lysin Cpl-1, and the engineered? OBPgp279. - Sounds like they are identified/classified by their target bacteria, and then by the five types of lysin catalytic domains they contain ? - Rod57 (talk) 09:14, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
 * As with all viral proteins, there are many thousands of lysins grouped in hundreds of unrelated families, so I think just explaining the types of catalysis is enough. I don't think mentioning many examples is a good idea since they don't have articles and the paragraphs would become unreadable (not only are lysin names long, but also often historically incorrect, e.g. T7 lysozyme). Anyway, here are about 30 pages of classification if you are interested. Neodop (talk) 20:01, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

Change structure and name
I would like to change the name of this article to "Endolysin". Then create a new page called "Lysin". Apart from a short description of what a lysin is this article will link out to different type of lysins articles such as:


 * - Endolysin (this article)
 * - Exolysin
 * - Autolysin
 * - Eukaryotic lysins (maybe there is a better name)

Does that sound like a good idea?

Johan Seijsing (SU) (talk) 14:01, 6 March 2018 (UTC)