Key difference in how TB bacteria degrade doomed proteins

Sunday, October 17, 2010 - 12:31 in Biology & Nature

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University have discovered a key difference in the way human cells and Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria, which cause TB, deliver unwanted proteins — marked with a "kiss of death" sequence — to their respective cellular recycling factories. This critical difference, described in a paper published online October 17, 2010, in the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, may help scientists design drugs to disable the bacterial system while leaving normal human protein recycling centers intact.

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