courtesy of Mark Anderson and H. Steven Seifert / Northwestern University
gonorrhea passes from person to person through some clever hitchhiking. For 40 years, researchers thought that Neisseria gonorrhoeae , the bacterium that causes the sexually transmitted disease, glommed squirming sperm during sex. But the idea did not explain how women spent the STD to men. Now, a new study reported this month in MBIO shows that rather than using the sperm like a surfboard, N. gonorrhoeae draw bacteria called cable pili -on proteins in sperm to tow through the coital liquid. Pili are normally wrapped in packets (left panel, red arrow), but when exposed to seminal fluid, they relax into individual strands (right panel, the red arrows). This exposes more hooks grapples for transportation, strengthen the ability of the bacteria to invade by as much as 24 times. The seminal proteins also help the bacteria attach themselves to the skin cells grown in a dish, that line both the male and female genital tract, which helps the infection. Drugs that Unhook pili gonorrhea can give new antibacterial that counteract the transmission of this STD that infects 100 million people per year.
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