Gastric cancer, Q fever, Legionnaires' disease, whooping cough—though the infectious bacteria that cause these dangerous diseases are each different, they all utilize the same molecular machinery to infect human cells.
Gastric cancer, Q fever, Legionnaires' disease, whooping cough—though the infectious bacteria that cause these dangerous diseases are each different, they all utilize the same molecular machinery to infect human cells. Bacteria use this machinery, called a Type IV secretion system (T4SS), to inject toxic molecules into cells and also to spread genes for antibiotic resistance to fellow bacteria. Now, researchers at Caltech have revealed the 3D molecular architecture of the T4SS from the human pathogen Legionella pneumophilawith unprecedented details. This could in the future enable the development of precisely targeted antibiotics for the aforementioned diseases.
The work was done in the laboratory of Grant Jensen, professor of biophysics and biology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, in collaboration with the laboratory of Joseph Vogel at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (WUSTL). A paper describing the research appeared online on April 22 in the journal Nature Microbiology.
Read more at California Institute of Technology
Image: A new, detailed structural model of a Type IV secretion system reveals how this complex bacterial machine assembles. CREDIT: Courtesy of the Jensen laboratory
