Chloe Seddon, Nanki Singh, and Renata de Vasconcelos

My name is E. coli, I am versatile bacterium that over the years I evolved many mechanisms to infect my hosts. I have a refined and well-orchestrated mechanism of infection comprising a repertoire of chaperones, translocators, accessory proteins and effectors.​

Evolution has favored me to create a conduit to infect my hosts, thrive and survive.​

This secretion system is my signature and is playing havoc in the scientific world which is constantly trying to elucidate its assembly process and main virulence factors. ​

One has been trying to equate a panacea, but I am a rather mysterious puzzle.​

The issues I was causing came to the fore when my fellow scientists discovered that other bacteria that belong to the class of Gammaproteobacteria shared many virulence factors with me.​

Although the quest to achieve the fulfilled elucidation of pathogenesis that myself and my relatives cause seems sometimes inaccessible, I would like to provide you with some enlightenment; as Albert Szent-Gyorgyi once said: “Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought”.

Submission by Chloe Seddon, Nanki Singh, and Renata de Vasconcelos