Yourself?

To Be Or Not To Be!

ADDICTION MODULES AND PROGRAMMED CELL DEATH AND ANTIDEATH IN BACTERIAL CULTURES

Hanna Engelberg-Kulka1 and ­ Gad Glaser2 ­
Extract:

“To be or not to be, that is the question!” The principal decision of each cell is to
choose life or to choose death. An addiction module is a genetically well-designed
simple “biological bomb” (121) that enables the cell to make such a decision at
definite times and physiological conditions. In the addiction module system, the
straightforward choice is death, which is facilitated by a stable intracellular toxin
that causes cell suicide, that is, death from within.

Choosing life requires a dynamic antagonistic process. The cell can survive only in the presence of an active process, requiring either the continued production of an unstable antitoxin or some process that would prevent its degradation.

Thus, the principle of toxicity-antitoxicity of the proteic addiction module is attractive on several levels. This notion of toxicity-antitoxicity suggests fundamental questions for future research of which we shall mention several.

1. The toxins of addiction modules are biotechnologically important because
they represent an enormous reservoir of potentially useful antibiotics. In
view of the widespread development of multidrug resistance among bacterial pathogens, the intracellular induction of such antibiotics could be used as the basis for alternative therapies and thus help to solve what has
become a major public health problem.

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posted by Downhere. @ 12:46 pm