bacteria – Lightsources.org

Newly identified protein could help fight cancer

2023/07/122023/08/15

Researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) have identified a new protein that helps an oral bacterium thrive in other locations around the body. The discovery could eventually lead to the development of new drugs that specifically target the protein.

“This bacterium is common in the mouths of humans and generally doesn’t cause disease in that location. However, it can travel through the bloodstream to other areas of the body, which leads to some pretty big health concerns,” says Dr. Kirsten Wolthers, Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Microbiology at UBC’s Okanagan Campus.

Most notably, this bacteria is prevalent in the tumors of colorectal cancer patients. The presence of the bacteria can contribute to tumor growth, spread of cancer to other sites in the body, and resistance to chemotherapy.

With the help of the CMCF beamline at the Canadian Light Source (CLS), located at the University of Saskatchewan, Wolthers and her colleagues determined that the new protein they identified enables the bacteria to take essential nutrients, such as iron, from our blood cells.

Read more on the CLS website

Image: Alexis Gauvin, inspecting a protein sample for particulate matter, using the glove box. Gauvin is a biochemistry student and a member of Dr. Kirsten Wolthers’s research group in the Department of Chemistry, University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus).

Magnetotactic microorganisms studied through materials science and advanced imaging

2023/06/082023/06/13

Researchers from the Bioscience and Biotechnology Institute of Aix-Marseille (BIAM) have recently published a new work in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The study reveals a singular association between magnetotactic bacteria and their host, a unicellular eukaryote (protist).

Magnetoreception is a function unique in the world of the living. Microorganisms are capable of perceiving and reacting to fluctuations in their environment: temperature, light, pressure, gravity, etc. The Earth’s magnetic field is also perceived by certain microorganisms: magnetotactic bacteria, whose mobility is guided by geomagnetic field lines. Magnetoreception guides their movement in aquatic sediments while locating more easily specific depths of the surface. In the microbial world, magnetoreception is based on the synthesis of intracellular chains of magnetic nanocrystals. It is currently the only form of geolocation to have been characterized by scientists.

All the microorganisms sensitive to the magnetic field described so far associate magnetoreception with sensory systems dedicated to certain physicochemical signals, thanks to which they can navigate towards or away from specific substances. This navigation behavior is called magnetotaxis and was, until recently, only observed in magnetotactic bacteria present in areas with strong chemical gradients such as aquatic sediments. By guiding their movement along vertical lines rather than in three-dimensions, their magnetism allows them to more easily find the zone where conditions are optimal for their growth. However, findings by researchers at the BIAM, revealed in 2019 that protists had also acquired this ability through a singular strategy. Some flagellated protists acquired magnetotaxis by associating with magnetotactic bacteria attached to their surface, becoming indispensable symbionts during evolution. This discovery, “revealed that magnetotaxis was performed collectively, with the eukaryotic host enabling swimming and perception of the chemical environment on one hand and the bacterial symbionts producing the nano-sized magnetic needles on the other. However, we did not yet uncover how these partners interacted from a physical point of view and how the magnetic properties are formed,” says Christopher Lefèvre, co-coordinator of the study.

When microbiology meets materials science and advanced imaging techniques

The study of living systems interactions at the microscopic scale would still be inaccessible without interdisciplinarity of scientists equipped with advanced scientific techniques. “Studying such an environmental biological system is difficult due to their size, low abundance and lack of models in culture, pushing technological limits,”comments Daniel Chevrier, CNRS researcher at BIAM, first author and also co-coordinator of the study. Researchers had to deploy “an arsenal of approaches and technologies”, including synchrotron-based X-ray microscopy at MISTRAL beamline of the ALBA Synchrotron.

Read more on the ALBA website

Image: Magnetotactic holobiont – the host is a unicellular eukaryote with magnetotactic bacteria on its surface

Undermining the foundations of bacterial resistance

2023/05/102023/05/12

Scientists from the University of Guelph have used the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan to better understand how several infectious bacteria, including E. coli., build a protective sugar-based barrier that helps cloak their cells.

Published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, the Guelph research provides the very early steps toward new treatments for E. coli and a whole range of bacteria. Their particular focus is on strains of E. coli that cause urinary tract and bloodstream infections, particularly those that are antibiotic resistant.

The research is looking to understand the enzyme that many infectious bacteria use to build the foundations of their protective capsule. The capsule helps shield the bacterium from attack by the human immune system and exists in many clinically distinct variants.

Making vaccines or drugs that targets the capsule itself directly is impractical as such treatments would target only a few bacteria. Instead, the Guelph team is focused on a key enzyme that builds the capsule foundation. This foundation could serve as a common point of attack, allowing a single treatment for several key pathogens infecting humans and livestock.

“We are interested in the machinery that builds the bacterium’s protective layer,” said Dr. Chris Whitfield, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. “By understanding and targeting the machinery, we can render the pathogen unable to survive in the host”.

Read more on the Canadian Light Source website

Image : Matthew Kimber, Chris Whitfield, and enzyme

Scientists discover potential method to starve the bacteria that cause Tuberculosis

2020/11/252020/11/30

By deepening our understanding of how Tuberculosis bacteria feed themselves, University of Guelph researchers have identified a potential target for drug treatment. The team used the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan to image the bacteria in fine detail.

The infectious disease Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. While rates of TB in Canada have remained relatively static since the 1980s, the disease disproportionately affects Indigenous populations. With TB-causing bacteria becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics, researchers and drug makers are eager to find new, more effective treatments.

Researchers have known for some time that the bacteria that causes TB (Mycobacterium tuberculosis) uses our body’s cholesterol – a steroid – as a food source. Other relatives of the bacteria that do not cause disease share its ability to break down steroids. In this study, the University of Guelph team identified the structure of an enzyme (acyl CoA dehydrogenase) involved in steroid degradation in another member of the same bacteria family, called Thermomonospora curvata.

Read more on the CLS Website

Image: This rendering shows the shape of a tunnel (orange) where the substrate binds. Any drugs targeting this enzyme would need to fit to this pocket.

Helping our immune systems bypass antibiotic resistance

2020/07/012020/07/01

Over 700,000 people die each year due to drug-resistant diseases and this figure could increase to 10 million per year by 2050, according to a 2019 report.

As the search continues for new antibiotics to treat drug-resistant infections, a group of researchers used the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan to address the problem from a different direction, by trying to weaken the ability of bacteria to develop resistance in the first place.

“The goal is to knock the bacterial cells down in terms of their resistance,” said Dr. Anthony Clarke, Professor and Dean of Science at Wilfrid Laurier University and adjunct professor at the University of Guelph. “We haven’t been successful over the last 30 years in finding new classes of antibiotics so, in the short term, we’re trying to weaken the cells so our own immune system can take over to fight infection.”

The target for his team’s work is peptidoglycan, which gives bacterial cell walls their rigidity. “Think of it as building a brick wall around the bacteria’s cells,” said Clarke. Since peptidoglycan can be broken down by lysozyme, an enzyme that exists in human immune systems, bacteria have developed strategies that block these enzymes by modifying their peptidoglycan, thereby “cementing the bricks in place,” and resisting our defences.

Read more on the Canadian Light Source website

Image: Dr. Clarke inspecting flasks of bacterial cultures in a student laboratory.

Preventing hospital-acquired pneumonia

2020/05/072020/05/11

Researchers used the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan to identify a previously unrecognized family of enzymes that put us at risk for deadly diseases.

Klebsiella pneumoniae is responsible for a variety of hospital-acquired infections such as pneumonia and sepsis. The bacterium has become increasingly resistant to antibiotics, making it a focus of interest for health care professionals and researchers.

>Read more on the Canadian Light Source website

Image: Chris Whitfield has been working on polysaccharides like LPS throughout his career.

Discoveries map out CRISPR-Cas defence systems in bacteria

2019/09/252019/09/27

For the first time, researchers at the University of Copenhagen have mapped how bacterial cells trigger their defence against outside attacks. This could affect how diseases are fought in the future.

With the aid of highly advanced microscopes and synchrotron sources, researchers from the University of Copenhagen have gained critical insight into how bacteria function as defence mechanisms against attacks from other bacteria and viruses. The study, which has just been published in the renowned journal, Nature Communications, also describes how the defence systems can be activated on cue. This discovery can turn out to be an important cornerstone in fighting diseases in the future.

The researchers have shown how a cell attacked by a virus activates a molecule called COA (Cyclic Oligoadenylate), which in turn activates a so-called protein complex called CSX1 to eradicate the attacker.

>Read more on the MAX IV website

Image: Model of the CSX1 protein complex.

The future of fighting infections

2019/08/212019/08/22

Scientists analyze 3D model of proteins from disease-causing bacteria at the CLS.

Millions of people are affected by the Streptococcus pneumoniae bacterium, which can cause sinus infections, middle ear infections and more serious life-threatening diseases, like pneumonia, bacteremia, and meningitis. Up to forty percent of the population are carriers of this bacterium.
Researchers from the University of Victoria (UVic) used the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan to study proteins that the pathogen uses to break down sugar chains (glycans) present in human tissue during infections. These proteins are key tools the bacterium uses to cause disease.

They used the Canadian Macromolecular Crystallography Facility (CMCF) at the CLS to determine the three-dimensional structure of a specific protein, an enzyme, that the bacterium produces to figure out how it interacts with and breaks down glycans.

Image: The 3D structure of an enzyme from the disease-causing bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae.

Research on how light-harvesting bacteria toggle off and on

2019/07/232019/07/31

The results could have long-range implications for artificial photosynthesis and optogenetics—the use of light to selectively activate biological processes.

Cyanobacteria are water-dwelling microbes capable of absorbing sunlight and converting it into chemical energy through photosynthesis. Long ago, ancient versions of these bacteria were incorporated into plant cells, where they eventually evolved into chloroplasts, the organelles responsible for carrying out photosynthesis in green plants. Today, in seeking to develop artificial photosynthesis to harness the sun’s abundant energy, scientists look to cyanobacteria to better understand the nuts and bolts of how natural photosynthesis works.

Cyanobacterial “off switch”

One topic of interest is how cyanobacteria respond to too much light. If a sunlight-harvesting system becomes overloaded with absorbed solar energy, it most likely will suffer some form of damage. Nature has solved the problem in cyanobacteria through a protective mechanism—an energy-quenching “off switch” in which excess solar energy is safely dissipated as heat.

Illustration: X-ray footprinting provides time-resolved information about where key conformational changes occur. On the left is the overall OCP structure. The two structures on the right highlight local areas with increasing protein packing over time (blue shading) and areas with decreasing protein packing over time (red shading). The changes in accessibility are initiated by the movement of the carotenoid molecule (magenta chain).

Study offers new target for antibiotic resistant bacteria

2019/06/182019/06/24

As antibiotic resistance rises, the search for new antibiotic strategies has become imperative. In 2013, the Centers for Disease Control estimated that antibiotic resistant bacteria cause at least 2 million infections and 23,000 deaths a year in the U.S.; a recent report raised the likely mortality rate to 162,044.
New Cornell research on an enzyme in bacteria essential to making DNA offers a new pathway for targeting pathogens. In “Convergent Allostery in Ribonucleotide Reductase,” published June 14 in Nature Communications, researchers used the MacCHESS research stations at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) to reveal an unexpected mechanism of activation and inactivation in the protein ribonucleotide reductase (RNR).

Understanding the “switch” that turns RNR off provides a possible means to shut off the reproduction of harmful bacteria.
RNRs take ribonucleotides, the building blocks of RNA, and convert them to deoxyribonucleotides, the building blocks of DNA. In all organisms, the regulation of RNRs involves complex mechanisms, and for good reason: These mechanisms prevent errors and dangerous mutations.

>Read more on the CHESS website

Image: William Thomas, a graduate student in the field of chemistry and chemical biology, collects data on ribonucleotide reductase.

Winning the fight against influenza

2019/05/312019/06/11

Annual influenza epidemics and episodic pandemics continue to cause widespread illness and mortality. The World Health Organization estimates that annual influenza epidemics cause around 3–5 million cases of severe illness and up to 650,000 deaths worldwide. Seasonal influenza vaccination still remains the best strategy to prevent infection, but the vaccines that are available now offer a very limited breadth of protection. Human broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) that bind to the hemagglutinin (HA) stem region provide hope for a universal vaccine (Figure 1a)1,2. Binding of these bnAbs prevents the pH-induced conformational changes that are required for viral fusion in the endosomal compartments of target cells in the respiratory tract and, hence, viral entry in our cells.

>Read more on the SSRL at SLAC website

Image: Complex of Influenza virus HA with (a) Fab CR6261, (b) llama single domain antibody SD36, and (c) JNJ4796.

How stained glass can help in the battle against superbugs

2019/05/302019/06/06

Ancient skills meet cutting edge technology in the battle against antibiotic resistance

Bacteria can form colonies (known as biofilms) on the surface of objects. This is a particular problem when it occurs on medical devices implanted into the body, such as catheters, prosthetic cardiac valves and intrauterine devices, as biofilms can display resistance to both antibiotics and the body’s immune response. Any incision into the body risks a surgical infection, and if a biofilm takes hold it can be difficult to eradicate. With the rise in antibiotic resistance, scientists are seeking new ways to prevent infections, and there is increasing interest in impregnate medical devices with antimicrobial substances. In work recently published in ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering, researchers from Aston University in Birmingham, led by Dr Richard Martin, explored the antimicrobial potential of phosphate glasses doped with cobalt, and found them to be effective against Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus and Candida albicans when placed in direct contact, suggesting that cobalt-doped bioactive glasses could be developed with antimicrobial properties. The technique they discovered is similar to those used to make stained glass in medieval times.

>Read more on the Diamond Light Source website

Image: Images of the copper (left) and cobalt (right) doped bioactive glasses.
Credit: Dr Richard Martin

“Molecular scissors” for plastic waste

2019/04/122019/04/12

A research team from the University of Greifswald and Helmholtz-Zentrum-Berlin (HZB) has solved the molecular structure of the important enzyme MHETase at BESSY II.

MHETase was discovered in bacteria and together with a second enzyme – PETase – is able to break down the widely used plastic PET into its basic building blocks. This 3D structure already allowed the researchers to produce a MHETase variant with optimized activity in order to use it, together with PETase, for a sustainable recycling of PET. The results have been published in the research journal Nature Communications.

Plastics are excellent materials: extremely versatile and almost eternally durable. But this is also exactly the problem, because after only about 100 years of producing plastics, plastic particles are now found everywhere – in groundwater, in the oceans, in the air, and in the food chain. Around 50 million tonnes of the industrially important polymer PET are produced every year. Just a tiny fraction of plastics is currently recycled at all by expensive and energy-consuming processes which yield either downgraded products or depend in turn on adding ‘fresh’ crude oil.

Image: At the MX-Beamlines at BESSY II, Gottfried Palm, Gert Weber and Manfred Weiss could solve the 3D structure of MHETase.
Credit: F. K./HZB

Structural insights into tiny bacterial harpoons

2019/02/282019/03/07

Bacteria produce complex nano-harpoons on their cell surface. One of their functions is to harpoon and inject toxins into cells that are close by. Producing such a complex weapon requires lots of different moving components that scientists are still trying to understand. Researchers from the University of Sheffield have been using some of Diamond’s crystallography beamlines to understand a particularly enigmatic piece of this tiny puzzle. The team led by David Rice and Mark Thomas worked on a protein component of the harpoon called TssA which they already knew was an integral piece of the machinery. However, unlike the other components of the harpoon, there are distinct variants of the TssA protein that contain radically different amino acid sequences at one end of the protein. The team showed that the structures of the variable region of two different TssA subunits were completely unrelated and they could assemble into distinctly different multisubunit complexes in terms of their size and geometry. This begged the question as to how different bacteria could use this protein with different structures to produce a harpoon with the same function across all species. They found that despite these differences, there was a very specific conserved region at the other end of the protein. They hypothesise that the conserved region is the part that does the work and helps the harpoon to function whereas the variable region acts as a scaffold. They used I02, I03 and I24 in their study and plan to do follow up work using X-ray crystallography and Cryo-EM such as those at the eBIC centre at Diamond. The research was published in Nature Communications.

Image: Macromolecular Crystallography (MX) at Diamond reveals the shape and arrangement of biological molecules at atomic resolution, knowledge of which provides a highly accurate insight into function.

Enzyme structure of bacteria that causes tuberculosis

2019/02/072019/02/14

Results on its interaction with antibiotics may lead to the development of new forms of treatment for this disease.

Tuberculosis is a chronic infection usually caused by a bacterium called Mycobacterium tuberculosis. This bacterium infects cells of the immune system called alveolar macrophages, which are responsible for removing pollutants and microorganisms from the surface of the alveoli, where the exchange of gases occurs during respiration.
It is estimated that approximately two billion people worldwide are infected with M. tuberculosis without symptoms. However, the clinical manifestations of the disease may appear at any time in life, especially when the immune system is weakened, such as due to malnutrition or diseases such as cancer and AIDS.
Tuberculosis is considered a curable disease when the patient is diagnosed and treated promptly with antibiotics. Nevertheless, the chronicity of this infection makes it difficult to eradicate bacteria altogether. Generally, patients must take the medication for several months, making it harder for them to persist in the treatment and favoring the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. In recent years, the emergence of new bacteria, resistant to routine treatments, has been a worldwide concern and it is imperative to seek new therapeutic strategies against this disease.

Image: (extract, full image here) Elements of the secondary structure of L,D-transpeptidase-3 from Mycobacterium tuberculosis acylated by an acetyl fragment derived from faropenem. Beta sheets in red, α-helices in yellow and the loops are shown in green. The figure shows, at the amino terminus (N-ter), the bacterial domain similar to immunoglobulin (BIg) and in the carboxy terminus the catalytic domain (CD). B-loop is a unique structure of this enzyme when compared to the other M. tuberculosis L,D-transpeptidases. In blue is shown an acetyl fragment covalently attached to cysteine 246 at the active site of the enzyme. Figure taken with Pymol.

A two-pronged defense against bacterial self-intoxication

2019/01/182019/01/23

Researchers solved the structure of a bacterial toxin bound to a neutralizing protein, revealing two distinct mechanisms for how the toxin-producing bacteria avoid poisoning themselves.

Microbial communities are of fundamental importance to virtually all natural ecosystems, from the ocean floor to the gastrointestinal tract. Although the term “communities” implies cooperation, scientists now realize that bacterial colonies compete with each other for life-sustaining resources, availing themselves of a variety of strategies to reduce overcrowding. In some cases, they secrete toxins in their fight for survival. Here, researchers studied one such toxin from the bacterium Serratia proteamaculans, various strains of which live inside tree roots or inhabit the digestive tracts of insects and other animals.

Toxin targets cell division

The researchers showed that the toxin, Tre1, targets a bacterial protein, FtsZ, which is analogous to tubulin in human cells. Tubulin molecules are the building blocks of microtubules—long polymers that provide structure and shape to our cells and play an important role in cell division. In bacteria, FtsZ loses the ability to polymerize when attacked by the Tre1 toxin. Instead of dividing, the intoxicated cells grow longer and longer until they eventually split open and die (cellular elongation and lysis).

Image: Healthy bacteria (left) and bacteria (right) whose cell-division machinery has been disrupted by a toxin newly discovered in some bacterial arsenals.
Credit: Mougous Lab