RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 A novel class of polymorphic toxins in Bacteroidetes
JF Life Science Alliance
JO Life Sci. Alliance
FD Life Science Alliance LLC
SP e201900631
DO 10.26508/lsa.201900631
VO 3
IS 4
A1 Biswanath Jana
A1 Dor Salomon
A1 Eran Bosis
YR 2020
UL https://www.life-science-alliance.org/content/3/4/e201900631.abstract
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.