To Breathe or Not to Breathe - The Secret of Anaerobic Pathogens

A longstanding mystery in the anaerobic bacteria Listeria Monocytogenes, one of the deadliest foodborne pathogen, is the conflict between their broken oxygen-dependent cellular respiration cycle and their dependence on oxygen for intracellular replication. In fact many other anaerobic bacteria can utilize alternative electron transfer mechanisms to survive in the absence of oxygen¹. We investigated the mechanisms behind such discrepancy and pinpointed an interesting chemical imbalance in the microbe in the absence of oxygen. The resulted was highlighted by the editors as one of the 90 spotlight papers out of the 2000 published papers that year. Our result pointed a promising therapeutic strategy to mitigate infections by these anaerobic microbes.

Figure 1. Extracellular Electron Transfer Mechanism.