In fact, anthrax owes its killing power to a complex combination of three distinct toxins : protective antigen, oddema factor and lethal factor, proteins which, in varying combinations determine how deadly a particular strain of anthrax can be.
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The structures of the other two, known as lethal factor and protective antigen, have already been worked out by the same technique, known as X-ray crystallography, an arduous way of visualizing structures too small to be picked up by light.
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"The bacterium is stifling the immune response completely, so that the body doesn't know it is being infected, " said Dr . Robert C . Liddington of the Burnham Institute in Torrey Pines, Calif . Liddington worked out the structure of lethal factor last year.
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In the other, scientists at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, Calif ., and Harvard reported they had come up with the first detailed structure of the protein so deadly and central to the toxin's work it is known as " lethal factor " or LF.
