Cholera is an acute bacterial intestinal disease, caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, which is characterized by sudden onset, profuse watery stools (given the appearance as rice water stools because of flecks of mucus in water) due to a very potent enterotoxin. The enterotoxin leads to an extreme loss of fluid and electrolytes in the production of diarrhea. It has been noted that an untreated patient can lose his bodyweight in fluids in hours resulting in shock and death.
How does the cholera bacterium gain a foothold in the intestines while competing with trillions of normal intestinal flora?
According to a university news release published Saturday, the answer lies in a study published in the latest issue of The Journal of Biological Chemistry.
Researchers from the University of York added to previous work from researchers from the University of Delaware where they shown that eating the sugar, sialic acid was important for the survival of V. cholerae in animal models. However, the exact mechanism by which the bacteria recognize and take up the sialic was unknown.
According to the University of York news release, the team led by Dr. Gavin Thomas, demonstrates that the pathogen uses a particular kind of transporter called a TRAP transporter to recognize sialic acid and take it up into the cell. The transporter has particular properties that are suited to scavenging the small amount of available sialic acid. The research also provided some important basic information about how TRAP transporters work in general.
According to Dr. Thomas:
“This work continues our discoveries of how bacteria that grow in our body exploit sialic acid for their survival and help us to take forward our efforts to design chemicals to inhibit these processes in different bacterial pathogens.”
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