| Literature DB >> 15864262 |
Kenn Gerdes1, Susanne K Christensen, Anders Løbner-Olesen.
Abstract
Although toxin-antitoxin gene cassettes were first found in plasmids, recent database mining has shown that these loci are abundant in free-living prokaryotes, including many pathogenic bacteria. For example, Mycobacterium tuberculosis has 38 chromosomal toxin-antitoxin loci, including 3 relBE and 9 mazEF loci. RelE and MazF are toxins that cleave mRNA in response to nutritional stress. RelE cleaves mRNAs that are positioned at the ribosomal A-site, between the second and third nucleotides of the A-site codon. It has been proposed that toxin-antitoxin loci function in bacterial programmed cell death, but evidence now indicates that these loci provide a control mechanism that helps free-living prokaryotes cope with nutritional stress.Entities:
Mesh：
Substances：
Year: 2005 PMID： 15864262 DOI： 10.1038/nrmicro1147
Source DB: PubMed Journal: Nat Rev Microbiol ISSN： 1740-1526 Impact factor: 60.633