Hospital-acquired infections are often hard to treat because the corresponding pathogens become increasingly resistant against antibiotics. Here, the bacterium Acinetobacter baumannii is particularly feared, and there is great pressure to devise novel therapeutic approaches to combat it. Bioinformaticians from Goethe University Frankfurt and Research Unit FOR2251 of the German Research Foundation have now detected an unexpectedly wide diversity of certain cell appendages in A. baumannii that are associated with pathogenicity. This could lead to treatment strategies that are specifically tailored to a particular pathogen.