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A weapon for bacterial warfare

The finding that bacteria use a sharp spike to deliver toxins into competing microorganisms, and that this mechanism co-evolved with a bacteriophage structure, presents a new vision of bacterial secretion systems. See Letter p.350

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Figure 1: Structures of the T4 bacteriophage and the bacterial type VI secretion system.

Notes

  1. *This article and the paper under discussion4 were published online on 7 August 2013.

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Correspondence to Alain Filloux.

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Filloux, A. A weapon for bacterial warfare. Nature 500, 284–285 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12545

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