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Comment
. 2010 Sep 21;107(38):16411-2.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1011935107. Epub 2010 Sep 7.

Fatal attraction: bacterial bait lures worms to their death

Kendra P Rumbaugh  1
Affiliations
Comment

Fatal attraction: bacterial bait lures worms to their death

Kendra P Rumbaugh. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
C. elegans uses a sophisticated chemosensory system to sense and move toward microbial by-products in its environment. Once a pathogen is consumed, it may kill worms slowly by dividing within the worm’s intestine and causing a prolonged, possibly disseminated infection or kill them quickly by releasing diffusible toxins. However, in PNAS, Niu et al. (2) describe a virulence strategy by which B. nematocida attracts C. elegans with a variety of volatile organic compounds and, once consumed, kills the worm by excreting two proteases, Bace16 and Bae16, which target host proteins essential for intestinal homeostasis.
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References

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    1. Niu Q, et al. A Trojan horse mechanism of bacterial pathogenesis against nematodes. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2010;107:16631–16636. - PMC - PubMed
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    1. Bargmann CI. Chemosensation in C. elegans. In: The C. elegans Research Community, editor. WormBook. 2006. Available at doi/10.1895/wormbook.1.7.1, http://www.wormbook.org. - PMC - PubMed
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