Scientists discover how Tc toxins inject bacterial toxins
Bacteria have developed many different ways of smuggling
their toxic cargo into cells. Tripartite Tc toxin complexes, which are used by
bacteria like the plague pathogen Yersinia pestis and the insect pathogen
Photorhabdus luminescens, are particularly unusual. Stefan Raunser from the Max
Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund and his colleagues from
the University of Freiburg have produced extremely accurate and detailed images
of these “toxic injections”; they reveal from where the molecule complexes take
the energy to penetrate the cell membrane. These proteins have potential
applications in medicine and could, for example, selectively deposit drugs in
cancer cells.