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Pore-forming toxins: ancient, but never really out of fashion.
Journal article

Pore-forming toxins: ancient, but never really out of fashion.

  • Dal Peraro M Institute of Bioengineering, School of Life Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
  • van der Goot FG Global Health Institute, School of Life Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
  • 2015-12-08
Published in:
  • Nature reviews. Microbiology. - 2016
Bacteria
Bacterial Toxins
Gene Expression Regulation, Bacterial
Pore Forming Cytotoxic Proteins
Virulence Factors
English Pore-forming toxins (PFTs) are virulence factors produced by many pathogenic bacteria and have long fascinated structural biologists, microbiologists and immunologists. Interestingly, pore-forming proteins with remarkably similar structures to PFTs are found in vertebrates and constitute part of their immune system. Recently, structural studies of several PFTs have provided important mechanistic insights into the metamorphosis of PFTs from soluble inactive monomers to cytolytic transmembrane assemblies. In this Review, we discuss the diverse pore architectures and membrane insertion mechanisms that have been revealed by these studies, and we consider how these features contribute to binding specificity for different membrane targets. Finally, we explore the potential of these structural insights to enable the development of novel therapeutic strategies that would prevent both the establishment of bacterial resistance and an excessive immune response.
Language
  • English
Open access status
closed
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/global/documents/96958
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