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- Title
Prokaryotic toxin-antitoxin stress response loci.
- Authors
Gerdes, Kenn; Christensen, Susanne K; Løbner-Olesen, Anders
- Abstract
Although toxin-antitoxin gene cassettes were first found in plasmids, recent database mining has shown that these loci are abundant in free-living prokaryotes, including many pathogenic bacteria. For example, Mycobacterium tuberculosis has 38 chromosomal toxin-antitoxin loci, including 3 relBE and 9 mazEF loci. RelE and MazF are toxins that cleave mRNA in response to nutritional stress. RelE cleaves mRNAs that are positioned at the ribosomal A-site, between the second and third nucleotides of the A-site codon. It has been proposed that toxin-antitoxin loci function in bacterial programmed cell death, but evidence now indicates that these loci provide a control mechanism that helps free-living prokaryotes cope with nutritional stress.
- Publication
Nature reviews. Microbiology, 2005, Vol 3, Issue 5, p371
- ISSN
1740-1526
- Publication type
Journal Article
- DOI
10.1038/nrmicro1147