Article of Significant Interest in This Issue

Intracellular tick-borne bacteria like Rickettsia spp. rely on secreted effector proteins to manipulate host cell machinery and facilitate bacterial infection. A major challenge in the field has been understanding the interplay between these effectors and host machinery and the consequences this has in mammalian and arthropod environments. Vondrak et al. (e00267-24) discovered that the effector Sca4 interacts with clathrin heavy chain and that this interaction may be important for rickettsial proliferation in the tick cells. Clathrin also facilitates cell-to-cell spread of rickettsiae independent of Sca4 in mammalian cells, highlighting the complexity of host-pathogen interactions in intracellular bacteria.