The hallmark of Mycobacterium tuberculosis is its ability to persist for a long-term in host granulomas, in a non-replicating and drug-tolerant state, and later awaken to cause disease. To date, the cellular factors and the molecular mechanisms that mediate entry into the persistence phase are poorly understood. Remarkably, M. tuberculosis possesses a very high number of toxin-antitoxin (TA) sy...

By adsorbing antigens and antibodies on barium stearate multilayers immunological reactions at surfaces have been studied. Pneumococcus polysaccharide specific antibody systems using purified antibodies from both horse and rabbit sera were investigated. The polysaccharides failed to show visible adsorption, but by alternate treatment with antibody and polysaccharide several layers of antibody c...

The authors reply: We appreciate the additional points raised by Rao et al. and would underscore the importance of early initiation of antitoxin treatment in cases of suspected botulism. A retrospective analysis of 132 cases of foodborne botulism reported to the CDC from 1973 through 1980 showed a median hospital stay of 10 days if patients received antitoxin within 24 hours after symptoms bega...

SecB chaperones assist protein export in bacteria. However, certain SecB family members have diverged to become specialized toward the control of toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems known to promote bacterial adaptation to stress and persistence. In such tripartite TA-chaperone (TAC) systems, the chaperone was shown to assist folding and to prevent degradation of its cognate antitoxin, thus facilitati...

Toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems are genetic elements of prokaryotes which encode a stable toxin and an unstable antitoxin that can counteract toxicity. TA systems residing on plasmids are often involved in episomal maintenance whereas those on chromosomes can have multiple functions. The opportunistic pathogen Staphylococcus aureus possesses at least four different families of TA systems but their...

Passive haemagglutination and IEOP have been used both to detect and to measure tetanus antitoxin in human donor sera. Forty percent of blood donors had detectable antitoxin but only 9% had levels suitable for production of human antitetanus immuoglobulin (larger than or equal to 2 IU/ml). The incidence of high titre antitoxin was significantly greater in men and was unrelated to the ABO blood ...