Bacterial shock responses

Bacteria, very early in their history, developed protective 'shock responses', triggered when the organism was exposed to some acute environmental stress. At the heart of each response was the accelerated synthesis of both general and stimulus-specified intracellular proteins. So successful was this strategy that its basic mechanism and several of its components were highly conserved throughout the course of evolution. This was particularly true of heat shock proteins whose universal distribution has both good and bad consequences for man.