You may know Bacillus cereus as a foodborne pathogen! 🤮 But did you know that B. cereus group strains can cause non-gastrointestinal infections, including wound infections (e.g., after a patient undergoes surgery; in patients with traumatic injuries)? B. cereus group wound infections can be extremely dangerous. 🤕 Despite the danger, we know almost nothing about how B. cereus group strains are able to infect wounds! 🩹

Aftab Nadeem’s group in the Department of Molecular Biology at Umeå University recently looked into B. cereus group wound infections and found that Nhe, a toxin produced by many B. cereus group strains, plays a major role. 🔬 In line with this, we used BTyperDB, our database of B. cereus group genomes with manually curated metadata to identify all known B. cereus group genomes isolated from wound infections; notably, we found that highly diverse B. cereus group strains have been linked to wound infections! 🦠

Overall, this study shows that the Nhe toxin plays an important role in the B. cereus wound infection process! 🧫 You can check out the paper for yourself here! ⭐