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Anthrax Essay

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Despite the three clinical forms of anthrax appearing different, our immune response to invading spores and how anthrax kills are the same.

When anthrax spores enter the body, they germinate and become active, toxic bacteria. After the spores enter they are immediately recognised and phagocytosed, or engulfed, by antigen-presenting cells, such as macrophages and dendritic cells [12]. Anyway, these antigen-presenting cells carry the anthrax spores to regional lymph nodes [12]. Typically, this does not usually happen; antigen-presenting cells are normally capable of engulfing and killing any pathogenic agent then and there [12]. Antigen-presenting cells are the immune system’s first line of defence, and they are capable of producing …show more content…

PA is one out of three components that are large, soluble proteins responsible for creating the anthrax toxin [12]. The other two components are the edema factor (EF) and lethal factor (LF) [12]. EF and LF respectively cause cells to swell (edema) or cause cell lysis, death [12]. PA comes into play by delivering EF and LF into the host’s cells. When PA is combined with either EF or LF, an edema toxin or lethal toxin is produced [12].

After the anthrax mail attacks in 2001, scientists learnt that once PA was bound to ATR, a protease from the host cells cleaves off the N-terminus of PA [12]. N-terminus is basically amino acid residue on one end of a polypeptide [14]. Anyway, cleaving N-terminus from PA induces a switch that causes PA to activate and bind to six other PAs [12]. With seven of these activated PAs together, they form a heptamer on the host cell [12]. They then bind to either EF or LF and the host cell ingests this new compound in through endocytosis [12]. The endosome formed inside the host cell becomes more acidic, and this changes the shape of the PA molecules within [12]. Consequently, the altered PA molecules form a pore in the endosomal membrane and EF or LF is injected into the host cell’s cytosol where they then become toxins [12].

The enzyme EF causes the cell to swell by catalysing the conversion of ATP to cyclic AMP [12]. By

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