How bacteria determine the rate of disease in your body –

If bacteria grow too quickly, there will not be enough resources to sustain cellular multiplication.

And if bacteria grow too slowly, energy resources will not be used efficiently. In this case, the bacteria risk not having time to establish a successful infection before being eliminated by the body’s immune system.

So it is important that the bacteria are exactly right with the stick.

Special focus on protein

Where is this controlled from? It’s been known for half a century by researchers to be a protein called SpoT, which according to the researchers can be compared to the beating “heart” of bacteria. The gist of the protein is that it has been very difficult to study.

One reason is the difficulty in purifying the protein. Protein purification is critical to understanding properties, function, and structure. Without this information, it would have been impossible to develop antibiotic molecules that inhibit SpoT and cause bacteria to lose their pathogenic properties.

It becomes a compact mushroom

But now researchers from Lund University, among others, have studied the three-dimensional structure of SpoT and discovered how the protein regulates the growth of bacteria.

Among other things, this demonstrates: to slow growth, SpoT assumes a compact, mushroom-like shape, and to increase growth rate, SpoT opens up.

This opens up opportunities for developing new medicines, says Vasily Horiliuk, a lecturer at Lund University.

With this newly acquired knowledge, there are now conditions for the development of new antibiotics that can directly attack the pathogenic function of bacteria at their ‘heart’.

Academic subject:

SpoT structure reveals evolutionary tuning of catalysis via conformational constraintAnd the Chemical Nature Biology.