Lacritin cleavage-potentiated targeting of iron - respiratory reciprocity promotes bacterial death.

ABSTRACT: Discovering new bacterial signaling pathways offers unique antibiotic strategies. With current antibiotic classes targeting cell wall synthesis, depolarizing the inner membrane, altering the bacterial metabolome or inhibiting replication or transcription pathways, manipulation of transporters to limit bacterial respiration and thereby pathogenesis has been a decades-long quest. Here we report an inhibitor of multiple bacterial transporters. The inhibitor is the bactericidal N-104 endogenous cleavage fragment of the prosecretory mitogen lacritin. Lacritin is now known to be widely distributed in plasma, cerebral spinal fluid, tears, and saliva. With the bactericidal mechanism determined to be nonlytic by surface plasmon resonance as confirmed by lack of SYTOX Orange entry, we performed an u

SUBMITTER: Sharifian Gh M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12147183 | biostudies-literature | 2025 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature