Dangerous Pathogens Use This Sophisticated Machinery to Infect Hosts

Gastric cancer, Q fever, Legionnaires' disease, whooping cough--through the infectious bacteria that cause these dangerous diseases are each different, they all utilize the same molecular machinery to infect human cells. Bacteria use this machinery, called a Type IV secretion system (T4SS), to inject toxic molecules into cells and also to spread genes for antibiotic resistance to fellow bacteria.