Laboratoire d'Ingénierie des Systèmes Macromoléculaires, Institut de Microbiologie de la Méditerranée, Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, Marseille, France.
Cellular and Molecular Microbiology, Faculté des Sciences, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Gosselies, Belgium.
Nat Rev Microbiol. 2022 Jun;20(6):335-350. doi: 10.1038/s41579-021-00661-1. Epub 2022 Jan 2.
Toxin-antitoxin systems are widespread in bacterial genomes. They are usually composed of two elements: a toxin that inhibits an essential cellular process and an antitoxin that counteracts its cognate toxin. In the past decade, a number of new toxin-antitoxin systems have been described, bringing new growth inhibition mechanisms to light as well as novel modes of antitoxicity. However, recent advances in the field profoundly questioned the role of these systems in bacterial physiology, stress response and antimicrobial persistence. This shifted the paradigm of the functions of toxin-antitoxin systems to roles related to interactions between hosts and their mobile genetic elements, such as viral defence or plasmid stability. In this Review, we summarize the recent progress in understanding the biology and evolution of these small genetic elements, and discuss how genomic conflicts could shape the diversification of toxin-antitoxin systems.
毒素-抗毒素系统广泛存在于细菌基因组中。它们通常由两个元件组成：一种毒素抑制一个重要的细胞过程，而一种抗毒素则对抗其同源毒素。在过去的十年中，已经描述了许多新的毒素-抗毒素系统，揭示了新的生长抑制机制和新的解毒模式。然而，该领域的最新进展深刻质疑了这些系统在细菌生理学、应激反应和抗微生物持久性中的作用。这将毒素-抗毒素系统的功能范式转变为与宿主及其移动遗传元件（如病毒防御或质粒稳定性）相互作用相关的角色。在这篇综述中，我们总结了对这些小遗传元件的生物学和进化的最新理解，并讨论了基因组冲突如何塑造毒素-抗毒素系统的多样化。
