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Science 23 February 2007:
Vol. 315. no. 5815, p. 1049
DOI: 10.1126/science.315.5815.1049n
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This Week in Science

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus is escaping hospital wards and causing severe disease among otherwise healthy people in the community. Increasingly, this bacterium is now traveling with a distinct virulence phenotype called Panton-Valentine leukocidin toxin, which alone can cause fatal pneumonia, but Labandeira-Rey et al. (p. 1130, published online 18 January; see the Perspective by Kahl and Peters) have found that the disease picture is even more complicated. By characterizing the pathology in a mouse model, they have discovered that the insertion of the two genes that express the toxin components also causes down-regulation of a repressor, which regulates the expression of an inflammatory mediator, and other cell wall-anchored proteins. The combination of these effects exacerbates the risk of dangerous pneumonia.




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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)