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Prokaryotic toxin–antitoxin systems: novel regulations of the toxins

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Abstract

Toxin–antitoxin (TA) systems are widely conserved in prokaryotic plasmids and chromosomes and are linked to many roles in cell physiology, including plasmid maintenance, stress response, persistence and protection from phage infection. A TA system is composed of a stable toxin and a labile antitoxin that inhibits a harmful effect of the cognate toxin. When gene expression from the TA loci is repressed under certain conditions such as nutrient starvation, the toxin is freed from the rapidly degrading antitoxin and obstructs an essential cellular process, such as DNA replication, translation and peptidoglycan synthesis, which subsequently causes growth arrest. TA systems are classified into five types according to the nature and the function of antitoxins, and the activity of toxins is tightly regulated in a variety of ways. This short-review highlights several novel regulatory mechanisms for Escherichia coli toxins that we recently discovered.

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Acknowledgments

The author cordially thanks Dr. Toshi Kawate at Cornell University for invaluable help with the manuscript. This work was partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists B (25870386).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Microbiology, School of Medicine, Dokkyo Medical University, 880 Kitakobayashi, Mibu-machi, Shimotsuga-gun, Tochigi, 321-0293, Japan

    Yuichi Otsuka

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  1. Yuichi Otsuka
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Correspondence to Yuichi Otsuka.

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Communicated by M. Kupiec.

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Otsuka, Y. Prokaryotic toxin–antitoxin systems: novel regulations of the toxins. Curr Genet 62, 379–382 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00294-015-0557-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00294-015-0557-z

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