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Bacterial toxins

When GENErosity backfires

Nature Reviews Microbiology volume 13, page 3 (2015)Cite this article

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Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) occurs most frequently among closely related organisms and facilitates the acquisition of adaptive traits. There are relatively few reports of HGT across phylogenetic domains, but two new studies now describe inter-kingdom HGT of two distinct families of bacterial genes, both of which encode antibacterial proteins, and show that these proteins are functional in their eukaryotic and archaeal hosts.

In bacteria, the Tae effectors are secreted by the type VI secretion system in a Sec-independent manner; however, the authors discovered that most of the Dae proteins had acquired eukaryotic Sec signals, which suggests that they have been functionally specialized for export in eukaryotes, thereby providing support for an adaptive function. Indeed, quantitative reverse transcription PCR revealed that the dae genes are expressed in eukaryotes and, remarkably, the Dae enzymes from representative eukaryotic hosts retained the ability to degrade peptidoglycan according to the substrate specificities of their Tae homologues, which suggests that they have been maintained in eukaryotes for their antibacterial function. Consistent with this, the authors found that the Dae2 enzyme of the deer tick Ixodes scapularis was capable of cleaving the peptidoglycan sacculus of the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi (which causes Lyme disease) in vitro and its expression also restricted the proliferation of B. burgdorferi in vivo.

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References

  1. Chou, S., Daugherty, M. D. et al. Transferred interbacterial antagonism genes augment eukaryotic innate immune function. Nature https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1038/nature13965 (2014)

  2. Metcalf, J. A. et al. Antibacterial gene transfer across the tree of life. eLife 3, e04266 (2014)

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Authors
  1. Christina Tobin Kåhrström
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Kåhrström, C. When GENErosity backfires. Nat Rev Microbiol 13, 3 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro3416

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