“Fascinating Machines of Death”: Donnelly Study Reveals How Bacterial Toxins Might Evolve to Cause New Illnesses
Research Highlights
Photo courtesy of uoftmedicine
By
Jovana Drinjakovic
The coronavirus pandemic is a daily reminder of the consequences brought by a successful invasion of human cells by a pathogen. As a new Donnelly Centre study on bacterial toxins shows, it does not take much for these encounters to turn deadly.
The research has found that two almost identical bacterial toxins cause distinct illnesses—diarrhea and fatal toxic shock syndrome—by binding unrelated human receptors. It also highlights a mechanism by which pathogens have evolved distinct receptor preferences to infect different organs.
“I always think of bacterial toxins as fascinating machines of death in how they find new ways to enter host tissue,” says Mikko Taipale, a co-leader of the study and an assistant professor of molecular genetics in the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research.
The work was also co-led by Roman Melnyk and Jean-Philippe Julien, both senior scientists at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and associate professors of biochemistry at U of T.
