Diphtheria is a serious, often fatal human disease associate...

created [InstanceEdit:5339552] D'Eustachio, Peter, 2014-03-04
dbId 5339555
displayName Diphtheria is a serious, often fatal human disease associate...
modified [InstanceEdit:5643874] D'Eustachio, Peter, 2014-11-18
schemaClass Summation
text Diphtheria is a serious, often fatal human disease associated with damage to many tissues. Bacteria in infected individuals, however, are typically confined to the lining of the throat or to a skin lesion; systemic effects are due to the secretion of an exotoxin encoded by a lysogenic bacteriophage. The toxin is encoded as a single polypeptide but is cleaved by host furin-like proteases to yield an aminoterminal fragment A and a carboxyterminal fragment B, linked by a disulfide bond. Toxin cleavage can occur when it first contacts the target cell surface, as annotated here, or as late as the point at which fragment A is released into the cytosol. Fragment B mediates toxin uptake into target cell endocytic vesicles, where acidification promotes a conformational change enabling fragment B to form a channel in the vesicle membrane through which fragment A is extruded into the target cell cytosol. Cleavage of the inter-fragment disulfide bond frees DT fragment A, which catalyzes ADP ribosylation of the translation elongation factor 2 (EEF2) in a target cell, thereby blocking protein synthesis. Neither fragment is toxic to human cells by itself (Collier 1975; Pappenheim 1977; Murphy 2011).
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