The experiment was repeated three times. Uninfected cells lysed in PBS with 0.1% deoxycholate served as a positive control and was arbitrarily set as 100%; the results were expressed relative to the positive control. Data analysis and statistical methods Statistical significances were determined using paired, two-tailed Student’s t-tests. Acknowledgements We thank Lenore Johansson for assistance with the electron microscopy, Kun Sun Autophagy Compound Library clinical trial for help with generating constructs for the bacterial 2-hybrid assay, and Konstantin Kadzhaev for aid with constructing the primers for the pdpC deletion mutant. This work was supported by grant 2009-5026 from the Swedish

Research Council and a grant from the Medical Faculty, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden. The work was performed in part at the Umeå Centre for Microbial Research (UCMR). Electronic supplementary material Additional file 1: Table S1: Stress sensitivity tests; Table S2. Bacterial strains and plasmids; Table S3. Primers used in this study. (DOC 160 KB) References 1. Bingle LE, Bailey CM, Pallen MJ: Type VI secretion: a beginner’s guide. Curr Opin Microbiol 2008,11(1):3–8.PubMedCrossRef 2. Boyer F, Fichant G, Berthod J, Vandenbrouck Y, Attree I: Dissecting the bacterial type VI secretion system by a genome wide in silico analysis: what can

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