Scientists at the School of Medicine have discovered how many common bacteria that cause potentially fatal diseases -- such as food poisoning, typhoid fever, plague and dysentery -- infect other cells, raising hopes for the development of new treatments for the diseases.
The researchers -- Jorge Galán, the Lucille P. Markey Professor of Microbiology and chair of the Section of Microbial Pathogenesis, and C. Erec Stebbins, a postdoctoral fellow in his laboratory -- report finding how the type III secretion system in Salmonella, the cause of food poisoning and typhoid fever, works to inject a host cell with bacterial protein.
Using a synchotron particle accelerator at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York, the scientists found that in order to be injected into host cells by the type III secretion system, the bacterial proteins need to bind to an associated chaperone protein that allows them to retain features necessary to be recognized by the "injection organelle."
"Many pathogens use a similar mechanism," says Galan. "Insight into any of them gives you insight into all of them. From this fundamental information, we can begin to develop completely new therapeutic strategies to halt or prevent infections by these pathogens." He notes that among the many bacterial pathogens making use of the type III secretion systems are those in E. coli (the cause of hemolytic uremic syndrome, or food poisoning), Yersinia pestis (the cause of plague), Shigella (the cause of dysentery) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (the cause of devastating diseases in children with cystic fibrosis). The bacteria are responsible for many thousands of disease cases and deaths in the United States and elsewhere in the world every year.
The study, which was reported in the Nov. 1 issue of Nature magazine, was supported by the Cancer Research Fund of the Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Foundation and Public Health Services grants.
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