Rocket Science in a Bacterium

Ready, aim, fire! The armed warhead rises from its silo, breaks free of its mooring, and aims for its target. This is not some element of a Golden Dome anti-missile program, but the Type VI Secretion System (T6SS) in action, one of half a dozen such molecular machines whose job is to send payloads into other cells. You may have heard of the Type III Secretion System (T3SS) that shares a few elements with the bacterial flagellum. This one is completely different. The T6SS was described recent...