Salmonella Death and Illness Studied by Pathogen Researchers at Yale
Yale researchers have discovered something about Salmonella that might lead to a new class of anit-microbial therapies that would neutralize the pathogen once inside the human body.
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The findings were published this week in Science Express and summarized by the university's public relations department. Salmonella is a leading cause of food poisoning in the United States -- the No. 1 cause of food poisoning hospitalizations and deaths. Salmonella outbreaks sicken 1.2 million people annually and kill about 400, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Yale research is all the more interesting because Salmonella and other pathogens have been showing resistance to traditional antibiotics. According to Yale sources, here's what the new study by senior author Jorge Galan found:
Salmonella bacteria rely on a sorting platform or molecular machine that attracts needed proteins and lines them up in a specific order. If the proteins do not line up properly, Salmonella, as well as many other bacterial pathogens, cannot "inject" them into host cells to commandeer host cell functions. Understanding how this machine works raises the possibility that new therapies can be developed which disable this protein delivery machine and therefore thwart the ability of the bacterium to become pathogenic. This process would not kill the bacteria as most antibiotics do, but would cripple its ability to do harm.
