Jammed Transmission

A driver in a traffic jam blasts an annoying catchy song. The next driver hears it, and whistles along. Then another hums it, and soon the whole street is a cacophony of unsynchronised earworms. The song might have been contained within the first car by a closed window, and that’s what a new molecule may do for dysentery-causing Shigella flexneri infections, which spread between cells lining the intestine's colon. The bacteria use a host cell’s internal skeleton to create protrusions towards neighbouring cells, which bud off as sac-like structures known as vacuoles to transmit the infection. A study identified a protein required for this conversion from protrusion to vacuole, and a molecule that inhibits it, thus preventing spread (pictured, red bacteria limited to isolated spots in an infected rabbit colon after treatment with the inhibitor). This could be a new route to treatment for a condition with no vaccine and increasing risk of drug resistance.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Steven J. Rolland and colleagues
• Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology, University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, Virginia, VA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Pathogens, May 2025