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From left to right: Jennifer Endres, Dev Ranjit, Jong-Sam Ahn, Ph.D., Batu Sharma, Soo-Jin Yang, Lakshmi Chandramohan, Ken Bayles, Ph.D., Toni Patton, Ph.D., Kelly Rice, Ph.D., and Suzanne Clabaugh. |
Toni Patton, Ph.D., Soo-Jin Yang and Ken Bayles, Ph.D., are authors of an article scheduled to appear in early February in Molecular Microbiology, the most prestigious journal in their field.
Lead author Dr. Patton said it means a lot to be published in such a journal, though it’s not her first article published. “We’ve been fortunate,” she said. “The more publications you have, the better off you may get a permanent position. It also helps in getting more grant money.”
Academicians often cite the phrase: “publish or perish.”
“I was happy and excited to hear the paper would be published,” Yang said. “It’s an important thing for us scientists.”
This most recent publication documents a new perspective on bacterial cell death. Among microbiologists, it has been thought that death of bacteria, which are comprised of single cells, is a passive process and that the bacteria dies on its own without cause.
For the first time, the team has reported a type of sensing mechanism in staphylococcus aureus that signals its death.
Dr. Bayles, who has been studying staphylococcus for 26 years, heads the team involved with the study. “For 11 years, I’d been dying to publish in this journal and had been rejected several times before,” he said.
“The death of bacteria just doesn’t happen randomly,” he said. “If there’s a sick bacterium, we think it’s the one that’s going to be eliminated. Somehow the bacteria that’s sick has to send the appropriate signal to initiate the cell death process. We think we understand a little bit about that signal and it’s sensed within the bacteria.”
The discovery is important because the team has revealed a new aspect of bacterial physiology that was not previously understood, or even recognized.
“Never before did anyone think bacteria had an organized way of dying,” Dr. Bayles said. “We think it’s a very organized and complex process that, if conditions are right, all bacterial cells have the potential to go through.
“The complex process of orderly disassembly of cells – or programmed cell death — is well known in human, animal and even plant cells. In bacterial cells, this hasn’t been thought of being something that’s possible in single cell organisms,” he said.
The information may be useful in uncovering new targets in the development of new antibiotics, said Dr. Bayles, who also leads a research team focused on staphylococcus, which is becoming a increasing threat to health locally and nationally.
In March, the Molecular Microbiology journal is expected to publish a paper by Yang (lead author) on the identification of genes in staphylococcus aureus that are essential for long-term survival. This will help scientists in developing new antibiotics.