Bacterial interaction with plants and animals, symbiotic or pathogenic, involves the transfer to host cells and tissues of a range of bacterial proteins whose biochemical activities are key to ...

Researchers at Umeå University in Sweden published a study “Breaking barriers: pCF10 type 4 secretion system relies on a self-regulating muramidase to modulate the cell wall” in mBIO that describes ...

Swallow the wrong microbe, and you might end up in the hospital with a needle or two in your arm — and plenty of itty-bitty bacterial needles poking at you from the inside. That’s because many ...

Once a pathogenic bacterium has entered its host, it turns on a series of defense and attack mechanisms to spread, invade and colonize deeper tissues and organs. This includes the secretion of an ...

Scientists have uncovered a surprising twist in how bacteria share genes—including those that spread antibiotic resistance. Tiny virus-like particles called gene transfer agents (GTAs), once ancient ...

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 ...

KIT researchers show how bacteria actively switch off their disease-causing mechanisms at high cell density and evade the immune system – a potential key to fighting infections better A research team ...

In recent years, scientists have begun to reveal the myriad ways that gut microbes can impact our health; they have identified relationships between bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract and the ...

Previous attempts relied upon pathogenic bacteria, which use this delivery system to inject effectors—proteins that usurp mammalian cell functions to benefit the microbes. To get around the ...

Intracellular protein trafficking and secretion of proteins into the extracellular environment are sequential and tightly regulated processes in eukaryotic cells. Conventionally, proteins that are ...