The ubiquitous production of antibacterial toxins, such as bacteriocins, is an ecologically significant class of interbacterial interactions that have primarily evolved through their indirect fitness benefits to the producer. Bacteria release bacteriocins into the environment at a cost to individual cell, but individual bacteriocin-producing cells are unlikely to gain any direct benefit from th...

Protein antibiotics, known as bacteriocins, are widely produced by bacteria for intraspecies competition. The potency and targeted action of bacteriocins suggests that they could be developed into clinically useful antibiotics against highly drug resistant Gram-negative pathogens for which there are few therapeutic options. Here we show that Pseudomonas aeruginosa specific bacteriocins, known a...

TRENDS IN MICROBIOLOGY 129 VOL. 7 NO. 3 MARCH 1999 Bacteriocins are one of the most abundant and diverse classes of antimicrobial molecules, having been detected in all major lineages of Eubacteria and in Archaebacteria1–3. They are potent, often highly specific toxins that are usually produced during stressful conditions and result in the rapid elimination of neighboring cells that are not imm...

Lactic Acid Bacteria (LAB) synthesize various metabolites during their growth phase and are Generally Recognized as­­ Safe (GRAS) Qualified Presumption of Safety (QPS). Ribosomally synthesized Antimicrobial Peptides (AMP) or Bacteriocins from the genera other prokaryotic cationic, heat-stable, amphiphilic membrane permeabilizing peptides built with an excess amount lysyl arginyl residues. compo...

Antimicrobial peptides exhibit high levels of antimicrobial activity against a broad range of spoilage and pathogenic microorganisms. Compared with bacteriocins produced by lactic acid bacteria, antimicrobial peptides from the genus Bacillus have been relatively less recognized despite their broad antimicrobial spectra. These peptides can be classified into two different groups based on whether...

The study of molecular evolution has become a valuable tool in understanding the origin of life and the speciation of organisms, with the focus on changes in DNA and protein sequence and their functions. Interest in studying the molecular evolution of bacteriocins, the narrow-spectrum peptide antimicrobials, was elicited due to the broad diversity and abundance of these proteins. The availabili...

Bacteriocins are bacterially produced peptides or proteins that inhibit the growth of other bacterial strains. They can have a broad (effective against multiple genera) or narrow (effective against specific species) spectrum of activity. The diversity of bacteriocins found in Nature, in terms of both spectrum of activity and physiochemical properties, offers the possibility of multiple applicat...

Survey results and genotypic characterization of Escherichia coli strains demonstrate that the bacteriocins colicin Ia and microcin V coassociate in a strain more often than would be expected by chance. When these two bacteriocins co-occur, they are encoded on the same conjugative plasmid. Plasmids encoding colicin Ia and microcin V are nonrandomly distributed with respect to the genomic backgr...

In recent years there has been an increased interest in bacteriocins, primarily among the lactic acid bacteria, as a result of their applications in food preservation. There has been very little research on the occurrence of bacteriocin production among anaerobic bacteria. Recently, we reported a high incidence of bacteriocin-like inhibitory activity in isolates of the rumen anaerobe Butyrivibr...