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Researchers at McMaster University have discovered a molecular "barcode" system used by disease-causing bacteria to distinguish between beneficial and toxic molecules. The ability to differentiate between proteins is vital for a bacterium's capacity to cause infectious disease. This finding provides insight into how bacteria discriminate between toxic and non-toxic proteins.
Researchers at McMaster University have discovered a molecular “barcode” system used by disease-causing bacteria to distinguish between beneficial and toxic molecules.
Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the new study shows that many bacteria can figuratively scan genetic codes to learn which proteins to keep and which proteins to expel into the environment.
According to researchers, those proteins that are expelled are often toxic to human cells, making the ability to differentiate between proteins vital to a bacterium’s capacity for causing infectious disease.
Proteins are one of the fundamental building blocks of life. They quite literally allow bacterial pathogens to do everything that they do. And while the vast majority of proteins remain inside bacteria to carry out functions like metabolism, there is a very small subset that act outside of the organism -; like toxins.”
John Whitney, associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster and lead investigator on the study
Whitney, a member of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, says that although the bacterial secretion system and the toxins themselves have long been studied, it was not understood how bacteria discriminated between toxic and non-toxic proteins prior to the study.
Whitney’s lab, led by biochemistry graduate students Prakhar Shah and Timothy Klein (now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco), questioned how three fundamentally different toxins could all be secreted by the same bacterial secretion system.
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