New clues for battling botulism: Scientists decipher details of deadly toxin's cloaking mechanism

Monday, December 7, 2015 - 05:00 in Health & Medicine

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators at Stony Brook University and the Institute of Advanced Sciences in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, have discovered new details about how "cloaking" proteins protect the toxin that causes botulism, a fatal disease caused most commonly by consuming improperly canned foods. That knowledge and the cloaking proteins themselves might now be turned against the toxin-the deadliest known to humankind-to deliver vaccines or drugs that could prevent or treat the disease. The results appear in the journal Scientific Reports, published online December 7, 2015.

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