Trigger that Turns Strep Into a Flesh-eater

One of the very unexpected and exciting things we discovered was a strategy group A strep uses to cause serious disease in humans,” Musser said. “This new mechanism we found controls virulence and determines whether the organism is just a pathogen or a really angry flesh-eating pathogen. That discovery would not have been possible without having this unusually large data set available for analysis with artificial intelligence.” To do this, they looked at the M28 strain of group A streptococcus, which causes a large number of invasive cases and a high incidence of childbed fever, in particular. In many countries, it’s among the top five most common group A strep strains causing serious invasive disease in humans. “Numerically, the M28s are very important causes of human infections, so we wanted to get new insight on it, because if you begin to understand the molecular pathogenesis processes, then you have ability to begin potentially developing new therapeutics and diagnostics,” he said. “We’re now able, using these very large data sets, to analyze them far more extensively and with different sets of eyes than we were able to in the past.” https://www.technologynetworks.com/tn/news/trigger-that-turns-strep-into-a-flesh-eater-315570?utm_campaign=NEWSLETTER_TN_Breaking%20Science%20News&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=70032263&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9VnAogoUP2nc14UfjvMZS6Ug5eFXX0jAJt8d_-8JU0hewvNHQpvfD79FH3WLiu5GOZK9FkthjCG7ntlA8rQ1jeJR8jCQ&_hsmi=70032263