Grant: Project Grant

During infection, many harmful bacteria first attack and kill the good bacteria of the human body that normally help keep us healthy. These invading bacteria use a crossbow-like nanomachine called the 'type VI secretion system' to fire toxins directly into adjacent bacterial cells. This poisoned molecular crossbow allows harmful bacteria to kill off normal beneficial bacteria and grow in our bodies. Although the harmful bacterial invaders are responsible for many human diseases ranging from life-threatening hospital acquired infections to food-poisoning, they share similarities in how their poisonous crossbow-like secretion system functions. The goal of this proposal is to gain an understanding at the molecular level of how disease-causing bacteria properly load deadly toxins onto their crossbow-like secretion systems. As we believe this toxin loading mechanism is universal, a detailed biochemical understanding of this process will allow us to discover how to effectively disarm many different species of harmful bacteria before they can even strike.