Some toxins produced by bacteria are so potent that scientists have long considered putting them to good use. This became possible when their structures were determined through the combined use of molecular biology and structural biochemistry. The current status of targeted toxin technology is perhaps best illustrated by exotoxin A produced by Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a Gram-negative bacterium t...

This paper describes a method developed for predicting bacterial toxins from their amino acid sequences. All the modules, developed in this study, were trained and tested on a non-redundant dataset of 150 bacterial toxins that included 77 exotoxins and 73 endotoxins. Firstly, support vector machines (SVM) based modules were developed for predicting the bacterial toxins using amino acids and dip...

Neutralization of bacterial toxins has become a compelling approach to treating bacterial infections as it may pose less selective pressure for the development of bacterial resistance. Currently, the majority of toxin neutralization platforms act by targeting the molecular structure of the toxin, which requires toxin identification and customized design for different diseases. Therefore, their ...

Bacterial genotoxins are unique among bacterial toxins as their molecular target is DNA. The consequence of intoxication or infection is induction of DNA breaks that, if not properly repaired, results in irreversible cell cycle arrest (senescence) or death of the target cells. At present, only three bacterial genotoxins have been identified. Two are protein toxins: the cytolethal distending tox...