The University of Alabama at Birmingham: A novel toxin – and the first ever found – for a deadly pathogen, M. tuberculosis
In this illustration, the Tuberculosis Necrotizing Toxin — symbolized by the explosives — causes necrotic cell death and enables release of the tuberculosis bacteria from the destroyed macrophage. Credit: Mathew Schwartz (Advanced Institutes of Convergence Technology, SNU) Despite 132 years of study, no toxin had ever been found for the deadly pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which infects 9 million people a year and kills more than 1 million. Now, Michael Niederweis , Ph.D., professor of microbiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham , and colleagues have described the first known toxin of this pathogenic bacterium. This toxin — Tuberculosis Necrotizing Toxin, or TNT — is the founding member of a novel class of previously unrecognized toxins present in more than 600 bacterial and fungal species, as determined by protein sequence similarity. Before the Niederweis discovery, those toxins were identified only as the “Domain of Unknown Function 4...
