A team of researchers led by Dr. Scott Wilbur, in the labs of Dr. VK Viswanathan and Dr. Gayatri Vedantam recently published their findings on "The Secreted Effector Protein EspZ Is Essential for Virulence of Rabbit Enteropathogenic Escherichia coli" in the journal "Infection and Immunity". They demonstrated that the secreted protein, EspZ, is critical for survival and colonization of host intestinal enterocytes, and it's absence resulted in the death and removal of epithelial cells, preventing E. coli colonization.
For more information see: http://iai.asm.org/content/83/3/1139.full.pdf+html
