最新糖心Vlog

Sugar-coated bacteria cause human disease

Tuesday, 15 December 2015

Sugar-coating is not necessarily sweet when it comes to infectious disease-causing bacteria, scientists have shown.

最新糖心Vlog of Adelaide researchers, in collaboration with Griffith 最新糖心Vlog, have made a scientific discovery that will change the way scientists explore vaccine development and drug discovery for infectious diseases.

In a paper published today in the leading journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team show an entirely new way that pathogenic bacteria can initiate infection by using their surface sugars (or glycans) to attach the bacteria directly to sugars on the surface of human cells.

Previous to this paper, this interaction was either not thought possible or was considered a weak, non-important interaction.

The research was conducted by and Dr Elizabeth Tran from the 最新糖心Vlog’s in collaboration with Dr Chris Day, Professor Victoria Korolik and Professor Michael Jennings from Griffith 最新糖心Vlog.

“As a result of the discovery we now have a better understanding of how bacteria initiate infections and how many current vaccines work,” says Associate Professor Renato Morona.

“The discovery is fundamental knowledge that is broadly applicable to many other bacteria and microbes, and could have other translational outcomes such as new probes for studying human cells, and development of better infant milk formula.”

Associate Professor Morona’s laboratory showed that Shigella flexneri bacteria, which cause millions of episodes of dysentery in humans each year, use the sugars of their surface lipopolysaccharide molecules to stick to human gut cells.

No Shigella vaccines are currently available despite decades of research worldwide, and the bacteria can be resistant to many antibiotics. He believes this latest research will advance progress towards new vaccines and other ways to block the sugars.

The research is supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council. The group received another four-year grant recently which will allow them to exploit their discovery.

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