PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Biswanath Jana
AU  - Dor Salomon
AU  - Eran Bosis
TI  - A novel class of polymorphic toxins in Bacteroidetes
AID  - 10.26508/lsa.201900631
DP  - 2020 Apr 01
TA  - Life Science Alliance
PG  - e201900631
VI  - 3
IP  - 4
4099  - https://www.life-science-alliance.org/content/3/4/e201900631.short
4100  - https://www.life-science-alliance.org/content/3/4/e201900631.full
SO  - Life Sci. Alliance2020 Apr 01; 3
AB  - Bacteroidetes are Gram-negative bacteria that are abundant in the environment as well as in the gut microbiota of animals. Many bacteroidetes encode large proteins containing an N-terminal domain of unknown function, named TANFOR. In this work, we show that TANFOR-containing proteins carry polymorphic C-terminal toxin domains with predicted antibacterial and anti-eukaryotic activities. We also show that a C-terminal domain that is prevalent in TANFOR-containing proteins represents a novel family of antibacterial DNase toxins, which we named BaCT (Bacteroidetes C-terminal Toxin). Finally, we discover that TANFOR-encoding gene neighborhoods are enriched with genes that encode substrates of the type IX secretion system (T9SS), which is involved in exporting proteins from the periplasm across the outer membrane. Based on these findings, we conclude that TANFOR-containing proteins are a new class of polymorphic toxins, and we hypothesize that they are T9SS substrates.