Characterisation of Type II toxins discovered through iterative guilt-by-association search
Date
2023
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
The classical toxin-antitoxin (TA) system is encoded as a bicistronic operon consisting of
toxin and antitoxin genes. Toxin-antitoxin systems have been studied for more than 30 years
and have been shown to play an important role in bacterial immunity and stress response. The
most common and best-studied class of TA systems is type II, where both the toxin and the
antitoxin are proteins, and the toxin is neutralized by the antitoxin via direct interaction. My
thesis helps to uncover the molecular mechanisms of type II toxins found by the
bioinformatics tool NetFlax (standing for Network of Flanking genes for toxins and
antitoxins) via metabolic labelling assays. I characterize several toxins from different
functional domains and show how the toxins affect the bacterial cell using Escherichia coli as
the model organism.
Description
Keywords
toxin-antitoxin systems, NetFlax, radioisotope metabolic labelling, translation, transcription, replication