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Protein Toxin Structure pp 97–121Cite as

The Anthrax Toxin

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Part of the book series: Molecular Biology Intelligence Unit ((MBIU))

Abstract

Anthrax is a disease known since antiquity1 and one of the first bacterial infections whose etiology was definitively established. The disease is caused by the Gram-positive, aerobic, spore-forming Bacillus anthracis, first isolated in 1877 by Robert Koch.2 The study of anthrax led to the establishment of Koch’s postulates, a set of criteria for identifying an organism as the causative agent of a specific infection.2 Louis Pasteur’s use of heat-inactivated anthrax cultures to immunize against the disease is generally credited as the first instance of a bacterial vaccine.3 Anthrax is primarily a disease of herbivorous animals, particularly sheep and cattle.4 Humans may acquire the disease from infected animals, typically as a cutaneous infection characterized by black pustules5 (whence the naming of the disease after the Greek word for “coal”). The pulmonary infection known as wool-sorter’s disease results from the inhalation of anthrax spores, often as a result of handling contaminated raw wool, hides or animal hair, and can lead to death within days.6–8 Though increasingly rare in human populations, anthrax remains of interest for several reasons, including its continuing incidence in animal populations,9 interest in improving the efficacy of the human vaccine,4,10 the threat of its use as a weapon of biological warfare (see ref. 11), its potential applications in the development of new therapeutic strategies such as targeted toxins,12 and as an experimental system for studying molecular pathogenesis.13

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Authors
  1. Carlo Petosa
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  2. Robert C. Liddington
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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Petosa, C., Liddington, R.C. (1996). The Anthrax Toxin. In: Protein Toxin Structure. Molecular Biology Intelligence Unit. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-22352-9_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-22352-9_6

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