Figure 2.

Intracellular traffic of VacA. (1) Binding of VacA (red) to target cells. (2) Endocytosis. (3) Accumulation in endosomes. (4) Endosome-mitochondria juxtaposition. (5) Import into mitochondria, assembly in hexamers and formation of anion channels in the mitochondrial inner membrane. Transfer of VacA from the endosomal membranes to mitochondria is essentially dependent on an intact VacA N-terminus (provided by subunit p34 as shown in Fig. 1). The pore for import into the mitochondria is formed by the TOM complex (translocase of the mitochondrial outer membrane).