AUTHOR=Ramisetty Bhaskar C. M. , Ghosh Dimpy , Roy Chowdhury Maoumita , Santhosh Ramachandran S. TITLE=What Is the Link between Stringent Response, Endoribonuclease Encoding Type II Toxin–Antitoxin Systems and Persistence? JOURNAL=Frontiers in Microbiology VOLUME=7 YEAR=2016 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/microbiology/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2016.01882 DOI=10.3389/fmicb.2016.01882 ISSN=1664-302X ABSTRACT=
Persistence is a transient and non-inheritable tolerance to antibiotics by a small fraction of a bacterial population. One of the proposed determinants of bacterial persistence is toxin–antitoxin systems (TASs) which are also implicated in a wide range of stress-related phenomena. Maisonneuve E, Castro-Camargo M, Gerdes K. 2013. Cell 154:1140–1150 reported an interesting link between ppGpp mediated stringent response, TAS, and persistence. It is proposed that accumulation of ppGpp enhances the accumulation of inorganic polyphosphate which modulates Lon protease to degrade antitoxins. The decrease in the concentration of antitoxins supposedly activated the toxin to increase in the number of persisters during antibiotic treatment. In this study, we show that inorganic polyphosphate is not required for transcriptional activation of