Toxic component of a type II toxin-antitoxin (TA) system. Inhibits translation by cleavage of mRNA. Induced by amino acid starvation and the protein synthesis inhibitor chloramphenicol. HigB-2/HigA-2 has been shown to stabilize plasmids very efficiently in E.coli. Three hours of ectopic expression of higB-2 results in bacteriostasis without any detectable loss of viability.