False friends: Phagocytes as Trojan horses in microbial brain infections

False friends: Phagocytes as Trojan horses in microbial brain infections

Humans are constantly exposed to pathogenic microbes. The first line of cellular host defense is composed of “professional” phagocytes, cells that efficiently recognize pathogens, internalize them, and then marshal an array of antimicrobial mechanisms to destroy them. Nevertheless, successful pathogens evade or survive such attack. A particularly subversive strategy is to manipulate normal phag...

Siderophores as “Trojan Horses”: tackling multidrug resistance?

Microbial drug resistance is partly due to hindered diffusion through the membrane of microbial cells and active transport mechanisms. An approach to counter such resistance uses the bacterial iron transport system. Extracellular free iron is scarce in vertebrates, yet essential for microbial growth (Anderson et al., 2012). A mechanism displayed by microbial pathogens to cope with iron scarcity...

Silicon particles as trojan horses for potential cancer therapy

BACKGROUND Porous silicon particles (PSiPs) have been used extensively as drug delivery systems, loaded with chemical species for disease treatment. It is well known from silicon producers that silicon is characterized by a low reduction potential, which in the case of PSiPs promotes explosive oxidation reactions with energy yields exceeding that of trinitrotoluene (TNT). The functionalization ...

On Trojan Horses in Compiler Implementations

This paper is to present a security-related motivation for compiler veriication, and in particular for binary compiler implementation veriication. We will prove that source level veriication is not suu-cient in order to guarantee compiler correctness. For this, we will adopt the scenario of a well-known attack to Unix operating system programs due to intruded Trojan Horses in compiler executabl...

Compiler Implementation Verification and Trojan Horses