June 26, 2017

Tetanus toxin is the neurotoxin that causes lockjaw. Many are vaccinated, but tetanus still kills tens of thousands of people per year worldwide. Researchers from the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, led by Dr. Pl Stenmark, have now uncovered the poison's structure. For the first time, the way the poison is constructed has been revealed.

"Our discovery could be used to design new medicines", says Pl Stenmark, Associate Professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Stockholm University.

Dr Stenmark and his research team have determined the three-dimensional structure of the entire tetanus toxin protein.

"We can now see the exact positions of the 20 000 atoms that build up the tetanus toxin. It means that we can see how both the toxin and vaccine actually look. Botulinum neurotoxins and the tetanus toxin are the deadliest toxins known to man. The toxins are large proteins that are made by specialised bacteria. The bacteria that produce the tetanus toxin are found in common soil and flourish in untended wounds. One unusual feature of the tetanus toxin is that it travels in nerve cells to the spinal cord from where it can cause life-threatening cramping and spasms."

These start with the shorter nerves in the face (lockjaw) and move on to cause spasms violent enough to break bones.

"We discovered that the poison takes on different forms depending on pH - it appears one way in acidic liquids and very different in a neutral pH environment. We believe that this is important for the toxins ability to move from the wound to the spinal cord and to adapt to different environments. Before this research, no one knew what the toxin looked like or that it changed structure depending on pH."

Pl Stenmark's research group also studies the botulinum neurotoxins, which are similar to the tetanus toxin, but causes paralysis instead of spasms and cramping.

"We want to know more about why these two poisons have nearly opposite effects - tetanus toxin travels through nerve cells to the spinal cord and cause severe muscle cramps whereas the botulinum neurotoxin stays put and causes paralysis. Our findings could be useful in creating new medicines that could be transported to the brain", says Pl Stenmark.

"People are not vaccinated against tetanus in many parts of the world, and infants and new mothers are particularly at risk. Large international vaccination programs have dramatically improved the situation, but tens of thousands of people still die of tetanus every year."

Explore further: Secret of tetanus toxicity offers new way to treat motor neuron disease

More information: Geoffrey Masuyer et al, The structure of the tetanus toxin reveals pHmediated domain dynamics, EMBO reports (2017). DOI: 10.15252/embr.201744198

Journal reference: EMBO Reports

Provided by: Stockholm University

The way that tetanus neurotoxin enters nerve cells has been discovered by UCL scientists, who showed that this process can be blocked, offering a potential therapeutic intervention for tetanus. This newly-discovered pathway ...

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators at Stony Brook University and the Institute of Advanced Sciences in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, have discovered new details about ...

UC Irvine School of Medicine researchers have discovered the mechanism by which bacterial toxins that cause food-borne botulism are absorbed through the intestinal lining and into the bloodstream. Their study, which appears ...

U.S. and German scientists have decoded a key molecular gateway for the toxin that causes botulism, pointing the way to treatments that can keep the food-borne poison out of the bloodstream.

(Medical Xpress)Scientists have manufactured a new bio-therapeutic molecule that could be used to treat neurological disorders such as chronic pain and epilepsy.

Injecting botulinum toxin A (known commercially as Botox) appears to be a safe procedure to improve smiles by restoring lip symmetry in children with facial paralysis, a condition they can be born with or acquire because ...

Because plants can't get up and run away, they've had to be clever instead. They are the chemists of the living world, producing hundreds of thousands of small molecules that they use as sunscreens, to poison plant eaters, ...

Inside each and every living cell, there are miniscule structures called membraneless organelles. These tiny powerhouses use chemistry to cue the inner workings of a cellmovement, division and even self-destruction.

Plastic with a thousand faces: A single piece of Nafion foil makes it possible to produce a broad palette of complex 3D structures. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, researchers describe how they use simple chemical "programming" ...

(Phys.org)A team of researchers at Stanford University has used ultrafast x-ray absorption and emission spectroscopy to quantify the entatic state of cytochrome c. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group ...

Scientists have developed a new low-temperature catalyst for producing high-purity hydrogen gas while simultaneously using up carbon monoxide (CO). The discovery-described in a paper set to publish online in the journal Science ...

A team of chemists from the University of Kentucky and the Institute of Physics Research of Mar del Plata in Argentina has just reported a way to trigger a fundamental step in the mechanism of photosynthesis, providing a ...

Please sign in to add a comment. Registration is free, and takes less than a minute. Read more

Read more:
New insights into the toxin behind tetanus - Phys.org - Phys.Org