At least 2,000 viruses, bacteria, and parasites are known to infect humans. Despite their enormous diversity, they share a common challenge: to survive, they must manipulate the cells they infect. Over millions of years of evolution, many pathogens have developed specialised proteins that help them hijack cellular processes and evade the body's defences.
Advances in genome sequencing have revealed thousands of these pathogen proteins, often called effectors. Yet despite their central role in infection, scientists still do not know what most of these effectors do. As pathogen genomes sequences accumulate faster than ever before, discovering the function of these molecular tools has become one of the major challenges in infection biology.
Researchers from the lab of Alexander Stark at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), in collaboration with the lab of Mikko Taipale at the University of Toronto, have now developed a powerful new platform that transforms how scientists study pathogen proteins. Applying it to nearly 4,000 proteins from viruses, bacteria, and parasites, the team discovered hundreds of previously unknown functions and built the first large-scale map of how pathogens manipulate human cells. Their findings are published in the journal Cell.
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Original publication
Tomas Pachano*, He Leng*, Guillaume Dugied, Travis Tribble, Vincent Loubiere, Felix Rauh, Yeojin Lee, Alexander Schleiffer, Veronika Young, Benjamin Weller, Eleanor A. Lyons, Matthew R. Hass, Leah C. Kottayan, Matthew T. Weirauch, Juan I. Fuxman Bass, Hayley J. Newton, Alexander W. Ensminger, Pascal Falter-Braun, Daniel Schramek, Alexander Stark# and Mikko Taipale#. “Systematic Discovery of Pathogen Effector Functions across Human Pathogens and Pathways”, Cell (2026), DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2026.06.017
*These authors contributed equally to this work
#Co-corresponding authors
Further reading