In an extraordinary example of altruistic behaviour, bacteria are capable of giving up their lives rather than allowing a viral infection to spread through their population. Now, new research has shown that viruses have evolved a mechanism that blocks bacteria from killing themselves.
The viral evasion process has been discovered in a strain of the potato soft rot and blackleg bacterium Pectobacterium atrosepticum by Professor George Salmond at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Biochemistry and researchers at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and was published in the journal PLoS Genetics.
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Image: Fading hope
Credit: Keoni Cabral on flickr
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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Viruses evolve mechanism to prevent bacteria from committing suicide
12 November 2012
Viruses are capable of outmanoeuvring the ability of bacteria to commit 'suicide', new research shows.