Conserved Patterns of Microbial Immune Escape: Pathogenic Microbes of Diverse Origin Target the Human Terminal Complement Inhibitor Vitronectin via a Single Common Motif.
Pathogenicity of many microbes relies on their capacity to resist innate immunity, and to survive and persist in an immunocompetent human host microbes have developed highly efficient and sophisticated complement evasion strategies. Here we show that different human pathogens including Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria, as well as the fungal pathogen Candida albicans, acquire the human term