Bacterial communication mediated by T4SS effectors

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Bacteria have the ability to inhibit the growth of competitors by using contact-dependent killing devices, such as the bacterial-killing type IV secretion system (T4SS). A recent publication in The ISME Journal by Wang et al. (ISME J, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-023-01533-7 ) uncovered that T4SS could deliver a unique “non-toxic” effector protein, LtaE, into interspecies bacterial cells. The delivery of LtaE by the bacteria Lysobacter enzymogenes induces the antifungal antibiotic 2,4-DAPG production by binding to the transcriptional repressor PhlF in another bacterial species, Pseudomonas protegens . As a result, P. protegens regains the capacity to protect plants from nearby fungal infections. This finding uncovered a novel role of T4SS in mediating interactions of interkingdom cooperation to kill microbial competitors in soil microbiomes.