TB-causing bacteria poisons itself when robbed of key enzyme

Today the latest Functional Glycomics updates came out in Nature and can be found here.  One of the highlights featured an article from our lab about drug delivery to B cells by targeting glycan-coated liposomes to an endocytic glycan-binding protein on the B cell surface.  The other three highlights were all about bacteria: B. fragilis triggers interesting chemistry and a negative feedback loop, a promising target for the treatment of tuberculosis was identified, and both a help and a hindrance to the bacterial agglutinating Surfactant Protein D were discovered.  Three of the four images that I made for these highlights have also been added to the Illustrations page. The fourth, shown here, was more of a design project, showing that silencing of one enzyme in M. tuberculosis causes an accumulation of its substrate, maltose-1-phosphate, to levels that are toxic to the bacterium.